


Dave Strider and the Bat Out of Hell

by oxfordRoulette



Series: Underworld [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Consensual Mind Control, F/M, Mild Sexual Content, Minor Violence, Original Mythology, Past Relationship(s), Texas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-01
Updated: 2014-06-07
Packaged: 2018-01-17 07:19:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 28,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1378738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oxfordRoulette/pseuds/oxfordRoulette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You meet an ancient girl after a bad breakup and get pulled along on her obsessive, terrifying search.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. She's a Maneater

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Дейв Страйдер и Большая Спешка (Dave Strider and the Bat Out of Hell by oxfordRoulette)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4565751) by [Mr_Scapegrace](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mr_Scapegrace/pseuds/Mr_Scapegrace)



> This is, officially, the second story in the Underworld series, but you are quite welcome to read this one first if you're not a Jadekat fan. This fic takes place slightly BEFORE Jade Harley and the Rise of the Underworld, and covers a bit more time than that fic did.
> 
> A warning that I didn't tag for since I didn't want it to show up in the respective relationship tags: This features some VERY one-sided Terezi/Karkat and Dave/Jade (mostly all concentrated at the beginning).
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

She dumped you.

She threw you out like a three year old with a stuffed animal and an open car window. She tossed you aside like an early 2000's Razor scooter during spring cleaning. She left you in the cold like you were a piece of Fat Nasty Trash flapping your pathetic plastic bag arms under the bridge.

In short, you're upset, dangerously sad, and have been lying face down on your couch for so long you're fairly certain the waffle-iron pattern is now permanently emblazoned on your pudgy cheeks. Waffles, man. Jade LOVED waffles. You know what she doesn't love? You. It's you, buddy. You winner of hearts, you Casanova, you sun-glassed ass.

You feel like you've got mere pennies, no, like, anti-pennies to your name without her, and it's only been five hours. You look at the metaphorical road to breakup recovery ahead of you and that slope is a fucking mountain. You're going to be hiking up that cliff, vertically, for months. Years, even. You might as well wallow at the bottom for as long as you can.

You do, in fact, need a shit ton of rations to prepare you for the long road ahead. You think that maybe, maybe, Dave Strider can temporarily put on his big boy shades and go get some fucking breakup ice cream. The adult stuff. The kind that puts chest on your hair. You're talking Double Butter Triple Cream Brownie Fudge Batter Chunky Monkey with Chocolate Pieces. And maybe a nice chick flick to help you shovel that shit down your piehole. Yeah, like _Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties_. That'll sure get the tears flowing so you don't have to spend them on Jade. Holy shit, tonight is going to be so awesome.

As long as you don't think about her.

You can't even start to get yourself motivated to get up, you need like, at least sixteen different iterations of _Chicken Soup for the Soul_ to get you off this couch. Reading about five year olds with cancer will probably make you feel even worse about yourself, transforming your breakup depression into a viscous cycle, eating itself and turning you back into ol' reliable and ever-peppy DStrides. Ah, yes, you remember that one chapter about sixteen orphans dying of tooth cancer in _Chicken Soup for the Sixth Grade Teachers_ , that really gets the blood pumping with recycled joy. 

You visualize the route you're going to take to the bathroom, just to get your mind off of shitty books of short stories commonly found rotting in neglect at the Dentist's office. You're going to stand up from the couch, take a look around at the pathetic squalor Jade left you in (piles of laundry between the couch and the TV, replica katanas scattered everywhere, kitchen visibly dank through the window provided by the small buffet counter), and move through the carpeted hallway next to the kitchen. You're going to take the door on the left, and open it to the worst bathroom in existence, a bathroom whose only window opens on the concrete side of the next building three feet away from you. You're pretty sure that violates some city ordinance or another, but at least no one can watch you take a shit there.

Okay, when you start thinking about fucking poop, it's probably time to hoist yourself out of this damned sand pit.

You peel yourself off the couch, turn on the lights in your nasty apartment, check the time (almost midnight, wonder what she's-- nope, stop right there Dave Strider, no riding down that train of thought), and wander into the bathroom. You look in the mirror. You could probably play fucking checkers on your face, there's at least 64 squares just on your forehead. You run some water through your hair to try and prevent it from being plastered to your skull with the sweat of self-pity, but that shit just doesn't want to cooperate. You start to pap the waffle iron pattern off your face. You give up after a whole three seconds. You are fairly certain the shitty gas station you'll be purchasing high quality lactose from will not care how baby soft your cheeks are.

You shove your shitty, leathery wallet that looks like it was robbed from the grave of a noir cop into your pocket and stumble feet first out of your apartment. You make sure to lock the door behind you (she gave her key back to you, right? Don't want any exes sneaking in and wantonly stealing your shit, right? Don't want her to just, randomly show up in your apartment, right?).

You make your way through the dimly lit halls, walk down a flight of stairs so shitty that even the concrete is trying to run away from it, and exit the building. Your car, way in the back of the lot, blinks at you with its one working headlight when you click your keys. You named it Putt-Putt. Because it's purple, gigantic, and runs on Windows 95, despite being a car.

You should really get that headlight fixed at some point though, but it's more entertaining when drivers think it's a motorcycle approaching them when it's actually a fucking Lincoln Town Car (where did Jade take her motorcycle anyway? Did she start the drive back home?). It's like, surprise! You thought it would be cool but it's actually the shittiest car imaginable. That's Dave Strider's car, right there.

You stumble in to the roomiest front seat that has ever existed, turn the radio to the "mid-2000s rap" station, and vacantly drive to the gas station. You're glad there weren't any like, fucking cats in the road or some other ungainly animal because you probably would not be paying enough attention to give the thing a wide birth. Not like you could miss it anyway, even if you were trying. This car is like the "broad side of a barn" expression but in reverse.

You drive into the gas station lot, get out, pull enough mental capacity out of your ass to lock your car, and wander through the front door. You head straight for the frozen goods section, and scan the rows for the one true love of your life (Jade isn't in the ice cream area, she'd be waiting in the-- no, stop it Dave, turn that train around. You're acting like an inept blond woman in a romcom).

They're out of your flavor.

Dammit.

Cookie dough is good enough, although infinitely inferior to the glory that is the "8000 calories in one bite" ice cream you had selected for yourself, so you pluck the faux dough from the shelf and carry it to the cash register.

You walk through the aisles, put the carton on the checkout counter, and take out your money before you notice that the cashier is...

Completely unconscious.

"Holy shit, oh, shit, dude," you're panicking, stop panicking, keep it cool. You run air through your teeth and pretend you haven't spilled all your marbles, open your eyes, and actually take a concentrated look at the situation.

The cashier looks about your age, rather dark skin, a mess of black hair you could mop the floor with, and big gauges you could probably fit your dick through. He should probably wear a life jacket with that sweatshirt on his itty bitty body, because he looks like he's... _drowning in it_. You brofist yourself for that one liner, that was a fucking good one liner.

He's face down on the counter, sitting in a stool with his arms drooping down. He literally looks like he just fell over and stayed done with the world. You can sympathize. You reach out a hand and lightly shake his shoulder.

"Hey, dude, wake-y wake-y eggs and bake-y." He doesn't move. Oh, fuck, is he even breathing? You really don't want to lock lips and lovingly CPR this guy. You shake a little harder. "There's no time for a nap. A man's gotta get his ice cream."

His head lolls to the side and when you see what he looks like, you can't help yourself. Your remaining marbles shoot out of that jar cracked by a broken relationship. "Oh, shit, fuck, oh god-"

This guy's eyes are half open, rolled all the way back so all you can see are the whites, or, well, what should be the pearly whites. There's this thick layer of blood seeping up from the bottom and it's gross as FUCK man. It's so gross that you're even calling yourself 'man' in your own thoughts without even flinching. It's oozing up around the edge of his orbs like almost-dried lava, and it takes a massive amount of effort to tear yourself away from the grotesque display happening in those peepers.

You forgot your phone too, it's probably sitting comfortably on your nightstand, unaware of the 911s it could be dialing, blissfully contempt at being utterly useless at this very moment. You start for the black phone behind the counter, but are interrupted by the most annoying trill of a voice you've ever heard.

"Oh, sorry about that, he does this all the time!" You glance over to your right, the gas station manager (identifiable by the giant pink button that says 'MANAG-ER 38D') is leaning against the entrance to the bathroom, mop in hand. "Just hit him with something and he'll bass-ically snap out of it."

She's serious. Oh my god. It's at times like this you wonder if ice cream is really worth all the bizarre trouble you have to go through. Not usually, but on this holy night, on this most terrible of rituals, it's totally worth it.

Maybe you should actually be calling 911, fruit-of-the-sea gas station manager be damned. Some dude's eyes filling up with blood is probably not a temporary condition, unless that temporary condition is Ebola. You watched a documentary on that and you don't want none of that shit in your pure, virginal cell walls. There's no way you're touching ebola dude. You try to tell the manager this, but she's already on her way over with a mop clenched in her surprisingly large fists. You can see the muscles try and pop out of her arms, this girl is ripped.

And she doesn't hold anything back either, she takes the handle of the mop and fucking whacks it into this guy's back, and it makes this noise like a home run. The guy shoots up like Jesus bursting out of his tomb while hacking up some nasty ass dredges of flem. He slams his hands on the counter, hoists himself up, and opens his incredibly normal brown eyes. Where the fuck did all that blood go? Did it run off and hide?

"Shit! Did I fall asleep?"

Asleep is probably the worst way to put it. The manager taps her fingers on the counter. "Yup! And remember what I said about the next time this happened?"

He sits up, rubs his head, and says like a man destined for the noose, "No."

She smiles like a Disney villain. "You're glubbin' fired, Karkat." She points at the door. "Get the shell out."

"What?" he says, looking utterly deadpan while sounding surprised. It's an unnerving contrast. "Fuck me with a toothbrush, how am I going to get home tonight?"

"I dunno, drive? Walk?" The manager stops smiling. She readies the mop like a warrior babe. "Whatever you usually do? Just get out of here."

You watch him stand up (holy shit, he's taller than you. Swear to God on high, he looked like you could break him in two when he was just lying there and all you do with your muscles is play video games and sort your underwear), crab walk around the manager without breaking eye contact, and shuffle backwards down the aisle while pointing at her.

"You're lucky--" he takes this giant breath through his nostrils. "--That I'm tired as a spent hooker. Otherwise no mere vehicular refilling station could hold my wrath, and I would be utterly unstoppable. You would beg, BEG, to have me cashing checks and sorting receipts once more." He narrows his eyes. Oh my god, he's taking himself seriously, this guy is a fucking joke. 

He even backs out the door, and you watch him trip over something on the concrete before the door shuts. The manager sighs. "I'm sorry about that, sir, I'll pay for your ice cream." She pauses, taps her finger against her chin. "Okay, paid. You're free to go."

You say thank you and goodnight (did she just steal that ice cream for you?) and try to get the hell out of here with your goods and dignity still remotely intact.

It's dark, the night smells like the summer pollution of the city outskirts, and the only streetlamp in this shitty gas station is flickering ominously. You don't see the guy that left anywhere. Feeling like a lamb lost from the flock in a forest known for its wolves, you shuffle-walk-run to your car, clutching your ice cream like the holy grail it is: A big ol' gold cup of cookie dough.

You glance behind you at the comforting light of the store (what are you anyway? Some kind of pansy apparently), but realize that was a terrible mistake when you walk into somebody.

Walk is too polite a word for what you do, you pretty much slam into him, and your reflexes don't react fast enough so you're still trying to take another step into a facefull of sweat-shirted chest when you get it together enough to hop backwards. You catch his smell, which is probably the most homoerotic thing you've done all night, and he stinks like dirty pennies and death. It's the worst. 

You manage not to drop your ice cream in your leap to safety, which you're honestly pretty proud of. Life achievements for Dave Strider, five points.

"Holy shit, man," you say. It's the guy from the gas station, oh Jesus, what if he mugs you? "Where the fuck did you come from?"

He looks at you, opens his mouth, and wheezes, clutching his chest and bending at the waist. If this guy keels over you are NOT taking him to the hospital, you are just leaving his rotting corpse in the dust and going home. He clears his throat, straightens up. "Not important." he says. "Look, you wouldn't happen to have a fresh cut or anything? Or, hell, I'd take a scabbed over one. Bleeding from your ears or any other orifice? Don't even care which one it is right now. Old band-aid?"

You seriously consider turning around and having the manager call the cops.

"Okay, uh, fuck, look can you just, offer me something? Preferably physical. Like a kiss." he pauses, takes one look at your face, and keeps talking. "Okay, not a kiss. You have any money? Silver, gold, whatever? I'd take a fucking paperclip if you had one jammed in those pockets."

This is totally a roundabout way to mug you. Might as well bluff your way out of it. "I have fifty cents."

"Good enough."

He holds his hand out and you dig in your pockets and get two quarters, which you deposit in his palm. You can't believe this guy is stealing fifty cents from you, what a fucking loser. You almost feel good about yourself looking at this wannabe-punk neckbeard, and you're the one with sweaty hair and hints of couch squares patterned into your face. "Uh, here you go."

He shivers like he just got cold water dumped on him after a sauna, closes his palm, and says, "That's the fucking stuff right there. Thanks." He wanders away, hands in his pockets, and you watch him get on the sidewalk and turn the corner. Where to? Headed straight towards batshitville, apparently.

You get to your indescribably spacious town car, get in, and start the short drive back to your apartment. You are unbelievably content to go back to the couch, lie down, and watch your personal Garfield movie collection while eating the whole ice cream carton. God, you're fucking trash. The ice cream is probably pretty melted by now and you're STILL going to eat that shit. Jesus fucking Christ. No wonder she dumped you. You're just going to shove your head into that barrel of liquid cream and slurp it all up like it was a feeding trough.

You remember, somewhere in your brain clouded by post-breakup depression, that you should probably be checking the road for obstacles or asshole drivers tailgating you. Defensively driving and all that. You glance in your rear-view mirror, and see all 16 miles through the back of your incredibly large car the distinct lights of a cop.

Oh shit, how long were they following you? How long were their sirens on? This is probably the worst night of your life.

You pull over to the shoulder, slicking your hair back in the mirror and doing your best "confused little boy" impression. The cop is probably going to ticket you for the broken lights on your car, it's past due for you to pay some exorbitant fees for irrelevant reasons. Because safety is incredibly irrelevant.

The cop pulling you over gets off their motorbike, no, wait, is that a police vespa? What the shit. And you watch her, yeah, probably a her, walk towards your car window with some kind of notepad in hand. You dig out your wallet to present your drivers license.

She comes up to your window and taps on it. She's got flippy blonde hair with black roots like an unfashionable stay-at-home mom, red nails that say she could kill a man if she wanted to, and very dark skin with a clear tan line around her neck. She's wearing shades at midnight, like you, which is awesome, but they look red matte and you wonder how the fuck she's seeing out of those things. She's popping gum and between each chew it looks like her teeth are artificially sharpened. Oh my god, you are FUCKED if you've done anything wrong, she'll bite your balls off.

"Please roll down your window, this is a matter of official United States justice!" she says. Her voice is like a soprano opera singer scratching a chalkboard, and that's just through the glass. You make a mental note to put some earplugs in your glove compartment.

You push the button and roll down your window, and reach out to her with your license. "Hey, I'm really sorry m'am, feel free to ticket me like a movie theater and I'll get this thing fixed so..."

You trail off because the cop stopped twitching. Her body is stock still, she's got this vacant expression on her face, and her nostrils are flaring at the most rapid pace you've ever seen. If she's having an attack or something...

She grabs your t-shirt collar, fucking pulls your head out of the window décolletage-first, and gets so close to your face you smell the cherry in her gum. "Where did you see him?"

This armed woman is breathing on your face and you thought this was about a goddamn headlight. Are you smuggling cocaine in your trunk or something? Did someone sneak heroin up your ass? "I... what?"

"Young, appears to be Hispanic, tattoos... probably still has fairly large earlobes for modern rebellious accessorizing." She sounds dead serious, tightens her grip on your shirt. Oh fucking hell, was that guy a drug dealer? Dammit, you gave him fifty cents. Not like fifty cents of weed would do shit, but still.

"Uh, yeah, I saw that guy. I thought he was going to mug me so I gave him two quarters to rub together. Can't believe I paid him off with fifty cents."

She stares at you (you think, seriously, those sunglasses are impenetrable) then pulls you out even further and sticks her face in your shirt.

What the fuck.

She takes this big breath through her nose, like she's trying to inhale your chest, then lets you go. The seatbelt snaps you back into place and you hit the seat with the distinct thump of terrified confusion. 

"Yes, you definitely smell like him, there's no mistaking it. Although this is some very close physical contact for a simple exchange of currency! Are you sure you didn't do anything..." she lowers her sunglasses and stares you in the eye. Her eyes are a nice shade of Pantone blue-grey-teal. You don't know why you had to specifically point that out, but for some reason you expected them to be without pupils, like you expected her to be blind. Why would you ever think that, Strider, she was riding a fucking bike down the road, you can't ride a fucking bike when you're goddamn blind. "... more intimate?"

"What? No. I ran into the guy, I didn't analy sex him up."

She grins like you're the butt of some inside joke, and her teeth line up like speleothems. They are, indeed, sharpened. That must have hurt like a bitch to get that done. "Where did you see the suspect?"

He's a suspect? Fuck, you're going to jail, you're going to be dropping the soap and using washable marker as eyeliner for the rest of your 20s. "The gas station a few blocks down, I watched him get fired and then wander off to god knows where."

She taps her pen on the top of the car. "Was he out of sorts, at all? Did he seem disheveled?"

"Babe, that guy didn't even have shelves to displace." you say. Maybe you should stop calling cops 'babe,' or maybe just stop calling everyone you meet 'babe.' The cop doesn't seem to mind though, she just cackles at you.

"Great. You're taking me there."

Wait, what. "Wait, what."

She moves away from the window and you watch her actions through your rear-view mirror. She opens the back seat of your car (wait you totally locked that shit down like a prize trophy) and wanders back to her tiny cop vespa. She picks it up, hauls it to your car, and pushes it into the backseat. Curse your incredibly roomy vehicle, it's getting you an awkward ride with the police.

She shuts the door, and walks around to enter your car through the passengers side. She settles in the seat and straps herself in, pushing the ice cream aside. It sloshes when she puts it under the dashboard. No. No, not the ice cream. This cannot be happening.

"There's no way this is legal." you say.

"Of course not," she laughs. " At least not by the fickle and soft United States justice system. But I've been waiting years for a lead in this state far too hot and far too close to my ancestral residence, and I've found it with you! Besides, I'm armed, deadly, and now a renegade cop on the run. You're going to listen to me."

She's right about that. You glance down at her pistols. Jesus, what is she even talking about? Are you a hostage right now? You hope you're not a hostage, your sister is dead and your mom is in Reno so there's no one to pay your ransom. You put the car in drive to turn around. You are trying very hard to restrain all natural inclinations to piss your own jeans out of terror, and focus on the road like it's a thin path through a pool filled with deadly sharks. 

"And, Mr. Strider, you're a valuable treasure to keep with me if we don't find who I'm looking for. I've known you for two minutes and I can already read you like an open book, and combining that with the clear emotional distress you're in for whatever reason... That comes in handy for certain _assets_ needed in my search."

Being a hostage sounds more preferable than the alternative, the only alternative that is nagging at the back of your head. That last phrase confirmed it. She said it like she was sizing you up, like you were a pig hanging in the butcher's and she was a fat German housewife.

"Maneater" by Nelly Furtado comes on the radio. The cop starts singing along.

She knows every. damn. word.


	2. The Meatloaf on the Bus Goes Round and Round

The gas station manager wrings her hands, pink nails flitting in and out of view nervously. "No, I'm sorry Ms. Offi-shell, I don't have his address. I don't even have a last name."

The cop slams her hands down on the counter and the manager flinches. Shit, this is weird. Maybe you should call the police. Wait, she is the police. The cop points her pen in the manager's face. "And you hired him anyway?"

The girl shrugs, enthusiastically. Yeah, you'd be shrugging enthusiastically too if you were being interrogated for illegal employment. "I don't know! It seemed like a good idea at the time. But looking back on it, it was dolphinately a bad idea..." she pauses, genuinely confused at herself. You don't think you've seen someone get genuinely confused at the idea of themselves since the third grade when everyone was becoming self-aware. "I think he... codvinced me to do it?"

The cop starts to object, reasonably. C'mon gas station fish girl, 'he made me do it' is what the Nazis said. That shit won't hold up in any court of law. But the cop frowns, then shakes her head. "If it were anybody else, I would take you right to the electric chair for lying in the face of the law--" you watch the manager's eyes turn to terrified dinner plates. "--But this is a special case. And he didn't leave any banking account information, car registration, or incriminating photos of his house that could possibly be backtraced through the World Wide Web?"

Is this guy a master of deception? He sure didn't seem like a creepy, intelligent thief. Two out of three of those isn't enough to wholeheartedly believe some quarter-mermaid convenience store owner. Although, who are you to judge the whims of your captor. Wait, did you seriously ask yourself that? Soon you'll be into BDSM and developing Stockholm Syndrome, a real Beauty and the Beast situation. You're Belle and the cop is Beast, and you don't even need to elaborate on that alternate universe fanfic, it already wrote itself.

"Alright, Miss Peixes, I believe we're done here." says the cop. She shuts her notebook dramatically and looks up towards the heavens. "Let this be a lesson for the future whenever you try to hire unscrupulous tattooed men who bleed in their eyes!"

"Um, okay. Thank you." 

You watch the cop turn to leave. Maybe if you just wait here... 

"Come on, Dave, let's ride." Dammit. She pats her belt, where a pistol hangs, threateningly. You're pretty sure there isn't any other way for a pistol to hang, but she could have at least patted something more creative. Like her handcuffs. Shit, Stockholm Syndrome is already setting in. You're doomed to indentured servitude while hearts fill up your eyes and you sing cute songs. And you won't even have a sexy village hunk come save you, Jade's your Gaston in this situation and her giant muscles are assuredly elsewhere. Shoulda married her when you had the chance.

Oh, shit, you made yourself sad. 

You follow her to the car, get in the drivers side, and shut the door. She's in the passengers seat before you can even attempt to lock the doors and drive away real fast.

"So, what now, lady-cop?" you say, tapping the wheel. "What are you going to do with me now? Hold me for ransom? Shove some drugs in my stomach and take me to Columbia where you'll feast on my cocaine-filled innards without bothering to cook me first?"

"I think you got that last part backwards," she says, laughing. Usually that kind of joke would get you a tiny giggle, but you can already tell this woman doesn't fucking play around with quietness. Her and the quiet are dangerous enemies, and she's coming out on top. "I think what comes next is my name. You can call me Terezi."

"First name basis usually comes when, I dunno, you're not fucking kidnapping me." Maybe you should tone it down a little, this cop is clearly off her rocker and you'll probably just aggravate her into blowing your head off. Or eating you. Whatever though, you're in such a vague cloud of sadness you literally don't give a shit. "What kind of name is Terezi, anyway?"

She grins, slowly, each tooth exposed one at a time. "Colombian."

No shit.

You must have had a freaked out kind of look on your face, because she breaks out into a loud, breathy cackle. "Dave, you're so gullible, I love it." Hey, that stings. "Playing on your archaic racist stereotypes almost makes me glad I missed out on catching Karkat!"

"So, uh," you cough to regain monotone control. Must. Be. Flatlined. "Why the fuck do you have your teeth sharpened if it's not to reenact the popular hit series Hannibal? Or Silence of the Lambs, I guess, if you're not a fucking casual."

"Easy. Because I don't eat mere physical objects! I like a little..." she waggles her eyebrows. They rise and fall above her opaque red lenses. "Variety in my diet." 

"Are you hinting at sucking my cock? Because I'm not into acupuncture."

"Alternative medicine is the way of the future!" she raises her arms in a wild gesture, smiling. "Hmmm, but that's not what I'm trying to say, although I'm sure your manhood could use some attention."

"No. No it couldn't. Never."

"Anyway, that reminds me of why I need you, Dave."

"Because you really need the D? Sorry, lady-cop, you're out of-"

"Stop trying to interrupt me! It is clear that you are going through some kind of period of sexual emasculation, but we are not here to discuss that right now!" She crumples her mouth in, frowning. That shuts you up. "I'm going to be frank with you, Dave. I have something important to tell you. There won't be any vague riddles or attempting to guess at what I am trying to actually say, because I will be clearly conveying it!" 

She's got both her hands on the center console, earnestly leaning over it and presumably staring you in the eyes in an attempt to analyze you. Well, her sunglasses are impenetrable and your sunglasses are impenetrable so it ends up devolving into the most pointless five second staring contest you've ever had. Seriously though, her glasses look like they were 3D printed out of a solid chunk of plastic. 

She pauses, takes off her glasses, leans closer to you. You can't back up any further, apparently the space-time in your town car decided to be rational at this very moment and provide limits on how far you could move away from Terezi. She looks incredibly serious, her lips pressed tight together. Her eyes... are an ocean. Her breasts... are... not that great actually she's pretty flat. Dammit, stop staring at her boobs.

"Dave, I think you would be more likely to believe what I have to say to you if I could provide you with some evidence." She puts her glasses between you and her, dangling them in front of your eyes. "... You should put these on."

"What? No. Hell no. I am not taking off my sunglasses."

She raises an eyebrow. "If I wasn't suspicious you were hiding something under those shades by now, you have definitely tipped the odds against you."

"Just tell me why you want me to put them on." Seriously, this lady is invading your personal business. You are not taking your shades off. Even though it's midnight, you're in a dark parking lot, and Terezi is probably going to be a temporary blip on the radar of your life in the long run (unless she murders you). Never give up the shades. Never surrender.

She looks at them, then at you, then says, "I got these special. They were 3D printed out of an opaque chunk of plastic. I can't see through them."

"Ha. Funny joke." Did she read your thoughts? Oh god, what if she read your thoughts? Terezi, are you there? It's you, Dave. Wait, why are you even freaking out about this, that doesn't even make any scientific sense. If Jade were here, she would berate you for mentally defying the laws of physics. "I don't believe you."

She frowns. "Just look at them! They are clearly sheets of thick plastic! I am essentially, no, incredibly blind with them on." You're illogically relieved she didn't refer to reading your thoughts. Why the fuck are you panicking about nothing?

"Yeah right, they've probably got... some kind of trick to them."

"Why don't you put them on and see? Or, in fact, don't see!" 

"That was a terrible joke and you should feel bad. Also, uh, still no." She frowns, then makes a grab for your shades with her left hand. Years of preteen training with your Brodad left you with incredible reflexes unhinged by the burdens of puberty, and you catch her before she even gets close.

"Wow, impressive," she grins. "I didn't expect you to react that fast. How cool."

"That's me babe, I'm a coolkid."

"I like it." she cackles, then returns to a flat-faced stare of judgement. "Can I do anything to convince you to put these on? Or even believe me?"

"You can return me safely and un-gunned to my apartment, leave them with me, and then never speak to me again."

"Wonderful, Dave! You're a genius!"

"I know right?" you say, completely deadpan. You're proud of yourself for that little phrase, there wasn't even an inflection on the end of that rhetorical question. You're slowly becoming the master of monotone, a skill which will prove useful when the inevitable heartbreak gets worse.

She sighs, sits back in her chair, sticking her sunglasses back on over her eyes. "Well, I won't force you to put them on... yet. Although I am curious why you won't take your own glasses off! I can't even smell through them, they're as dark as my coffee in the morning."

She must take her coffee hella dark, because your shades are fucking black. Blacker than outer space, blacker than anti-matter, blacker than Rose's cold dead heart. Okay, hold the phone, why did she say 'smell?' You're at least 96% sure eyes don't smell like anything, and if they do, yours are probably a lightly scented blue raspberry that wouldn't waft off your face further than two centimeters. You're glad that, deep in your subconscious somewhere, you picked out a smell for your eyeballs. You sick fuck.

Terezi continues. "I might as well tell you then! Feel free to sit down."

"I am sitting down."

"Then we're already halfway there!" she laughs. Was that a joke?

She turns her head towards you, the light from the shitty streetlamp reflecting off her straw-colored dye job creating some kind of terrible yellow-ception color combination. Her laugh vanishes into a little smile, like she's going to play some big trick on you.

"Dave, I'm a god. A very, very old god."

"Good on you, you got an afterlife or something?"

Her smile gets wider. The teeth reflect the glaring yellow light. "This is why I like you! You're so accepting--" she purrs that word. "--under the guise of it being funny. But you and I both know you're more than a little scared right now."

You're not, you're totally not, your hand is just shaking because it got possessed by a ghost or something. 

Fuck, shit, this woman is crazy. She thinks she's a god. Literally. You need to find an opening and get out quick. You're going to get murdered in a gas station parking lot and no one is going to go to your funeral. Who even cares about dead Daves? Nobody.

She laughs, turns back to face out the dashboard window, and you can't help but feel a little relieved to know she stopped looking at you under those opaque lenses. She continues. "No. Afterlives are for the weak, those that need to be coddled. My followers knew, completely understood, the fact that the only true justice in this world is that we all end up in the earth." 

"Justice, huh? Once a cop always a cop?"

"Once a cop always a terrifying deity! Until now." she huffs, crossing her arms. "I haven't gotten to use my abilities for at least seventy years, more if you count the fact that the only power I used for a century was 'cause minor karmic justice by having disgusting men trip over buckets.'" She smiles, reliving some memory or another. "The only reason I'm not starving away and dying right now, like another good deity friend of mine, is because I have rationed every little ability since the day I saw the fall of our civilization coming."

She turns towards you again. Stop shaking, left hand. "And, I might not have made it... But I've occasionally gotten help from people like you along the way." Teeth line up in sharp little rows, ready to bite into your neck, sink through your throat--

"Uh, what kind of help, now?"

"Just a little bite, a little one. Right out of your pretty bubblegum brain."

You panic, fumble for the handle behind you. Doesn't move. Locked. Fuck. 

She reaches forward incredibly fast, grabbing your hand currently trying to escape your damn car. Soon to be your damn coffin. She grips it tight, way tighter than what you thought her flabby arms were capable of, and you yelp.

"Oh, coolkid, that wasn't a very cool noise at all." She's all in your face now, your vision taken up entirely by those terrifying teeth. "I told you, I don't eat people. I'm not some kind of vulgar character who needs blood sacrifices to regain my strength! I eat something different."

"Jesus fucking Christ, Satan, get behind me."

"Did you know that Satan was originally a innocuous judge of humanity?" She tilts her head and you just know in your heart that she would be pointing at herself if her hands weren't grabbing your wrist and shoulder, respectively. "The onslaught of time, changing perceptions, and the developing belief in the afterlife turned Satan into a metaphor of evil. And presumably changed his appearance." She smiles.

"Oh my god, you're the devil. You're literally Satan." you say it in a joking monotone, but your voice is quavering a bit. You're at least half serious here. Maybe 75%. "You've come to tempt me and eat my soul. Well you can't fool me. I've read my Bibles and high-fived my Jesuses, there won't be any soul stealing here."

"Hmmm, I hear the joke in your voice but you're actually pretty en pointe! Good job, Dave!" Shit shit shit you're in the car with the devil fuck- "But I'm definitely not the devil."

"That's what the devil would say."

"I disagree." She gets very serious here, her mouth flatlining and her eyebrows retreating behind the red of her lenses. "Dave, I understand you're panicked. I would be too. But I need you to help me." She looks down, suddenly finding the pedals under your feet very fascinating. "I've been looking for my husband for a very, very long time. Or, hmm, ex-husband, I suppose. And I'm so close! I've been so close for years because he's one slippery little--" she says a word here, it rolls off her tongue like something smooth and dark and clicks in the back of her throat with a sound filled with flem. What the fuck kind of language was that? "--Sorry, just a nickname. Anyway, I promise what I need from you, it won't affect you at all. It might be kind of fun for you! If you like exploring your own head, that is."

You don't, but you'll just ignore that confusing last bit. So, she's been driven insane by her husband dumping her. He probably has a restraining order against her too, maybe even a hidden identity with the way she's acting. Who the fuck would even think about dating a lady with a rack of sharpened teeth? Did she get them sharpened after they got married? Probably, you can't have a good marriage once the blowjobs stop, that's what Brodad used to say. Brodad could never get married though because he was gay and you live in Texas so you don't know what the fuck he knew about marriage. 

Although, seriously, who the hell would marry Terezi? They'd have to be utterly batshit, so fucking weird you could--

And then, it hits you. 

"That's... Your husband... Is that weird guy who mugged my fifty cents."

"A brilliant deduction, Strider!" she snaps her head back up to you. "That skinny asshole has been evading me for a millennia, and I'm pretty sure he's not even trying! He probably doesn't even know I'm here! I got a lead on him three years ago when I was in Massachusetts, and I pulled every string I had to get transferred to this police department."

"Have you tried... Googling him?" Oh shit, are you getting sympathetic? No, stop it, your situation is nothing like hers! You definitely didn't have a significant other who you dated for a long ass amount of time, who is currently probably not giving any flying fuck about you because you put it under the guise this was all 'mutual.' It was not. Mutual. And you definitely don't have a weird creepy obsession with said ex-significant other, and definitely will not continue having said obsession for a long while, it's totally different than what Terezi experienced.

"I'm not very good at this newfangled computer thing, but I did! He's only got a first name, sometimes not even that! He's incredibly hard to track down and I've been at least within sixty miles of where he lives for two years." She sighs, lets go of your wrist and shoulder. "He appears to be using his abilities without discrepancy, meaning he's probably been having to compensate for them in increasingly bizarre ways."

Is that what the fifty cents was... Wait, are you buying into this? Nope, you're just going to ollie on out of that train of thought. You're allowed to be sympathetic but this woman is clearly delusional. You ask a normal question. "How'd you break up?"

She sits back in her seat again, crossing her arms. She stares out the window. "I said it was mutual. It wasn't."

God fucking dammit you did not want to have anything in common with Terezi and look at you now. Your heart is fucking breaking in two for her.

She keeps talking, staring out the window. "I had a bad time in my life, and before I knew it he was just... up and gone. I didn't even notice it. I thought I was over it too! I've been over it for so, so long, but I got word of him and..." she sighs. "I just want to talk to him."

This is some weird shit. You do not want to end up like Terezi, believing you're a god of time or some other equally unlikely deity. You've got to get over Jade, like a normal, healthy human being.

Maybe tomorrow.

"Hey, yeah, I get it," you say. "I just got dumped by my girlfriend like, six hours ago."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, it was mutual though. People have to move on, go with the flow. People change after dating someone for five in a half years, I get it, things get repetitive in the bedroom, et cetera and so on. I bet we broke up because she wanted me to put on more than the cat ears in our yiffing. I'm totally cool with it."

She looks up at you, stares at you for an uncomfortably long amount of time, and says, "Right."

"Anyway, now that we've had this fascinating heart-to-heart conversation, I don't think it's too much to ask that we leave each other on a mutual understanding, you get your bike out of my car, and drive out into the sunset with the realization that I will not fucking help you find a guy who I don't ever want to see again and who probably doesn't want to see you again." You wanted to end that line with 'you crazy piece of shit' but decided to hold off on that one for now.

"That is definitely too much to ask, Strider." She smiles again. You missed that rack of teeth. "Because we still haven't gotten to the part about how you're going to help me."

"I thought that stopped with the comment about taking a bite out of my brain. Sorry, that's Strider property and Strider property only, you're not allowed any taste of my organs, no matter how delicious they might be."

"Probably very delicious."

"Thank you."

She casually swipes a hand through her hair. "But again, I'm not literally going to take a big bite out of your brain. I'd be doing it metaphorically, with your consent."

"Are those teeth a metaphor too?"

"Yes!" she pokes one and you watch the skin of her fingertip dent against the sharp point. It makes you shiver. "See, totally fake. A complete metaphor."

"Somehow I think you're bluffing."

"Oh Dave, I never lie." She takes a long, manicured nail, picks at something between one of her canines (you think, they all look like her canines), and flicks it to the side. Gross. "What will happen is: you and me link up, we go explore the assuredly fascinating inner reaches of your head, I find the core of your being, take a little bite out of it, and suddenly, my powers are back! And I can find my husband and leave you alone."

"... What?" 

"This all has to happen with your consent," she says. "Which is why, as you've noticed, I'm not using my firearm to force you into this."

You're incredibly confused, but at least now you know that you've got an out if you keep resisting. She might be fuck deep in crazy, but at least she's going to be nice about it.

"Of course, if you say no, I will keep bothering you! Be prepared for me to show up at your door every day, after my shift, and ruthlessly interrogate you until you give into my whims!"

"Yeah, still no. No to the nth power. No times six thousand billion. I am going to goddamn drive back to my apartment, kick you out of this car, and face-plant straight into that melted bucket of ice cream. I will take a naked bath in that ice cream and your peepers won't be watching. You can come back and knock on my door all you want tomorrow, but I'll be too busy wallowing in the vestiges of dripping lactose and sugar to come answer." She starts to say something here but you keep talking. "--And don't you fucking dare say 'but my peepers can't watch you, Dave' because that's bullshit and I know it."

"But my peepers- dammit." She scrunches up her mouth to the side, clearly displeased, but gets over it with another smile. "Well, I'll let you off the hook for now, but I truly doubt you won't answer the door for me tomorrow. You're just too nice."

"I am not nice, I am a hardcore motherfucker with cabinets full of swords that are so deadly."

"So deadly."

"You wouldn't even believe how deadly they are. Anyway, get the fuck out of my car so I can drive home."

She pats your arm, gently. "How am I going to figure out where you live if you don't drive me to your abode? I may not use a gun on you to get you to help me, but I can make an exception for this scenario."

"Goddammit."

You turn to face the dashboard again, buckle your seatbelt, and dig your keys out of your pocket. That turned out to be a really awkward way to perform those series of steps, because you have a hard time reaching into your jeans under the taught band over your lap. Seriously, you're fucking trash.

You start the car, back up, and drive out of the parking lot.

"What kind of radio are you into?" are you, Dave Strider, who has just been held hostage by an insane renegade police officer, really asking said police officer what the fuck she's into? Are you some dainty little pussy? Is she growing on you? Are you some dainty little pussy who wants a big Terezi schlong in it? Like, what the fuck.

"Mmm, rock and roll," she says, turning the tuning dial on your radio station to 106.9. The song starts up in the middle of [some kind of wicked guitar lick](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QGMCSCFoKA). "I love this song! I saw him in concert in the 80s." Huh. You wouldn't have pegged her as a classic rock fan, you picture classic rock fans as more neckbeard dad-like who had their prime in the 60s.

"What did your parents take you as a baby or something? That's incredibly irresponsible. No wonder you married a weird guy and sharpened your teeth." You take a left turn onto the main road.

She cackles. "I didn't have parents."

"That's the saddest thing I've ever heard."

You drive for a bit, and out of the corner of your eye you see Terezi headbanging. This isn't even a headbanging song, why the hell is she doing that? She is clearly confused about styles of music.

"The sirens are screaming and the fires are howling way down in the valley tonight!!!" she belts out, screeching like a vulture along with the music. Jesus fuck.

"What the fuck. No."

"Why not?"

"No singing along in this car all-"

"There's evil in the air and there's thunder in sky and a killer's on the bloodshot streets!" She sings the line all dramatically, like she's Freddie in the Scooby Doo gang and they've got to be quiet around the spooky ghosts.

"Fuck you. Fuck everything. This isn't some kind of shitty road trip with a bunch of punk three year olds. We won't be singing any of this 'The Meatloaf on the bus goes round and round' in this car."

"Dave this song is the highlight of human achievement in the musical arts!" she keeps singing, her voice scratching down your ear drums. "Oh baby you're the only thing in this whole world that is good and pure and right--"

You know, you're pretty sure your mom listened to this on Sunday afternoons while she vacuumed. Your mom was unbelievably 80s rock. You might know the chorus.

"--But I gotta get out, I gotta break it out now--"

You might as well drown out the sound of Terezi's godawful singing. Time to sing along with some of that infamous, monotone Strider belting, the kind that got your Brodad banned from 16 karaoke bars on the East side. You're pretty sure they have his picture up on their respective "Wall of Shame"s still.

"--when it's over you know, we'll both be so alone!"

It's not like you want to sing along in some kind of disgusting duet, you're just kind of... uh, no okay you actually are totally down with having a bizarre duet with your kidnapper. A story to tell the grandkids. If you ever have any of those. You take a deep breath to prepare the appropriate volume levels. Terezi keeps singing.

"LIKE A BAT OUT OF HELL I'LL BE GONE WHEN THE SOMETHING SOMETHING"

Terezi only increases her volume. "WHEN THE NIGHT IS OVER--"

"SOMETHING SOMETHING GONE GONE GONE"

"LIKE A BAT OF HELL, I'LL BE GONE WHEN THE MORNING COMES!"

"WHEN THE MmmMMMHMHMM SOMETHING DONE MMHMM MMMMMM SOMETHING DOWN"

"AND THE MOONLIGHT'S SHINING THROUGH--"

You sing the whole goddamn rest of the song like this. All the way to the very end of your drive. At some point you just start wailing incomprehensibly out of sheer lack of lyrical knowledge and Terezi can barely scream out the words because she's laughing so hard and it's almost scary to admit you're mildly enjoying this.

You drive into your usual parking spot. Terezi gets out of the car without prompting, opens the back door, and hefts her bike out.

You unbuckle your seatbelt. "What, not going to walk me to my door? Not going to stand there and grab my hand while I fiddle with my keys and flutter my lashes waiting for my virgin kiss?"

"Nope, if I wanted to kiss you, Dave, you'd be aware of it by now." She places her bike on the ground upright, then shuts your car door. You get out and lock it. "Besides, now that I know where you are, I can find where you live."

Right, you forgot she was an incredibly creepy, obsessive stalker. All that mild fun you had in the car turns to sour milk in a matter of nanoseconds.

She gets on her bike, starts it with a rumble. "See you tomorrow."

"If you're not fired by then." you call back as she drives away. You're going to have to google "what to do police abuse" and try not to get put on an FBI watchlist. You're left standing in the smothering hot night, fingering your keys between your hands. You forgot about the ice cream. You peek in through the window of your car to check the damage.

Shit's overflowing in a wet pile of fluid like a milf at the Twilight screening. Fuck.


	3. We're goin ghost

You planned on locking the door, closing all the shades, and being a responsible adult in charge of their life by googling where the hell to report police corruption. What ended up happening follows as such:

You locked the door, grabbed your Mac book, sat on the couch, and promptly fell asleep.

"Fuck." you say to no one. You feel awful. Your neck hurts from sleeping sitting up. Your wrists will probably get early onset carpal tunnel from being poised at your keyboard for the length of your nap. You feel like dry socks have been force fed to you and they're still hanging out in your throat. A pile of drool has taken a sentient form and is currently trying to waterfall down the sides of the couch. This is some gross shit. You are some gross shit, Dave Strider.

You rub your neck and get your laptop off your lap. What time is it anyway? You press spacebar a good twenty times rapidly to get it out of sleep mode. Overkill? You don't know the meaning of the word.

Shit, it's like, 5:30 in the PM. Whatever, like you have shit else to do.

You wonder if Terezi ended up knocking on your door. She must not have been enthusiastic about it if she did, you got your uninterrupted beauty rest and feel all the worse for it.

You make some Kraft Mac and Cheese, and eat it in the bathroom while taking selfies in the mirror. You can't tell if you're trying to be pathetically ironic or if you're just so sad the irony has seeped its way into this awful scenario. You snapchat one to John because fuck that guy, he deserves this. He deserves this awful imagery for having such a heartbreaker for a sibling. You label it with 'mac and sleeze' and raise your shirt a little. You hope he screencaps this, it's a masterpiece.

Afterwards you spend like two hours planning out a Sweet Bro/Hella Jeff comic, but what usually comes so easily is blocked by thousands of jpeg artifacts of sadness. You give up and start aimlessly surfing the internet. By 'surfing the internet' you mostly mean, 'clicking the random art button on deviantArt.'

You spend a lot of time avoiding Facebook, but gazing at the bookmark longingly. It's a metaphor, see: you put the killing link right in front of your eyes and spend three hours being a shit and not clicking on it. You wonder if Jade got rid of the relationship status thing yet. You're sure as hell not changing it, don't want John texting you like: 'i can't believe you corrupted my pure and innocent virgin sister' Yeah sorry buddy, Jade is quite possibly the most corrupt person you've known in your life. Dammit, stop missing her, you pathetic hipster.

You check the time again, it's around one in the morning. You guess Terezi just forgot about you or something, maybe she found some other hapless sap to kidnap. 

Something wells up in you, an emotion you don't want to examine, but you can't help your overclocked brain from digging into it. It's disappointment. You are, seriously, disappointed that a crazy cop did not come to knock on your door today. What the fuck is wrong with you?

Just then, you hear a knock, a frantic hard one. Wow, is this some kind of shitty horror movie or something? Just as you think of the killer coming to your door... the killer comes to your door. Might as well answer it, not like you really have anything better to do.

You don't even bother looking through the peephole, there's only one person who would visit you at this hour and her name starts with a T and rhymes with cur-razy. Okay, you're stretching that one a little, but fuck it, you're saving your wit for the inevitable banter that will soon occur. You're kind of looking forward to it.

You open the door.

That's not Terezi.

"Uh, who are you and why are you knocking on my door at one in the fucking morning?" your voice comes out a little dryer and scratchier than you would have liked but, eh, can't win them all.

The guy is huge. He's wearing some kind of gross bro muscle shirt, with the long hair to match. He's glistening with sweat like he's just exercised for the first time in years, but looking at the huge rippling muscles on this guy you know he probably pumped iron fairly recently. For hours. "I have come to rob you. I am very sorry." He pauses. "It's not polite to swear to guests."

You try to shut the door but he jams his foot and tree trunk arm in it. He's got a knife in that hand. Shit, he's not kidding. What the fuck kind of robber knocks on someone's door and announces their intent before mugging them? You make a promise to always look through the goddamn peephole before ever opening the door. Don't trust anybody: a lesson you have never taken to heart, apparently.

He backhands the door open and you stumble backwards with the force. You step to the side as he comes through, sweating with nervousness. Looks like he's not a very experienced robber. You cross your arms and turn to him as he approaches your television.

Huh, you're awful calm about this. You just cannot bring yourself to give a shit. 

He looks at you. "Are you not going to resist? I was prepared for..." he wrings his hands. You swear you can see his sweat levels increase. "... Resistance."

"Yeah, no sorry, I just got dumped. Don't see the value in worldly possessions anymore. Take whatever you want, just keep the Doritos in the cabinet."

He wrings his hands again, his muscles bulge. "I don't think you are in the appropriate position to be making demands..."

Is this guy real? Are you tripping on the sentient pile of drool from earlier this evening? You start to retort when you hear another voice from behind you.

"This is the police, you're under arrest for robbing an insolent innocent!" You turn towards the door, which Terezi is leaning on, crossing her arms and grinning. She's not in her uniform, she's wearing khaki boyshorts and a godawful dragon T shirt that makes her look like an 80s D&D god. It's quite possibly the greatest fashion ensemble you've seen in weeks. She starts making 'wee-ooo wee-ooo' siren noises while twirling her finger around. 

"Oh, hey Terezi. What took you so long?"

"I told you, I'd show up after my shift to bother you! Who is this man and why is he inspecting your television like he's going to steal it?"

"I think he is going to-"

"Are you truly a police officer?" the man asks. He grits his teeth and clenches his fists. Shit, that doesn't look like a good sign at all, that's a sign labeled 'I'm actually a threat and not a bizarre happenstance' if you've ever seen one.

"Why of course!" answers Terezi. Not a good choice Terezi, the guy looks like he's about to freak out, and that's only stoking the fires.

And then he snaps. At you.

He reaches for your neck, and you flinch back, but his terrifyingly long arms reach longer than you expect and you feel huge sausage fingers close around your throat. Shit. Oh shit.

He yanks you towards him and you're pulled along with a tight cinch of your airway. "Terezi--" you squeak out. You have barely enough time to grab onto his arm before he lifts you up by your throat. Your body weighs down from your neck and sends this burning pain right from around your adam's apple. Your scrawny arms grasp desperately at his tree trunk muscles to try and get some leverage.

Terezi takes some kind of self defense stance. Your lungs keep expanding to get more air. "You are under--" 

The guy starts to ramble. He's clearly panicking. "I will not get caught it has taken me so long to be coached into this I shall not fail I must do this I must get cash worthy items--"

"--arrest--"

You feel the blood drain from your face. You can barely breathe, your lungs feel like they're filling up with water. "Terezi," your voice comes out so quiet, you hope she can hear above the rambling. "Shoot him. Something." You try to gasp, you feel like you're dying, like this is it. Shit, you never had a chance to change your Facebook relationship status. The last words you sent to anybody was "mac and sleezy." At least Rose and Brodad will be in the big Atheist graveyard in the sky to chastise you about it.

"I'm off duty! I don't have a gun!" she says it like she's trying to make an excuse for herself. 

"--I cannot leave witnesses I cannot fail in my mission for material possessions to sell for--" he cinches tighter, no more air gets through your pathetic wheezes, and you make a short-term goal to try to make peace with death in the next five seconds. You've never been good at goals.

Through your blackening vision, you see Terezi wince, then shake her head quickly like she's trying to stamp down a bad memory. She clenches her fists. And then something you never thought would happen happens.

A dawning horror overtakes even your fear of death. A notion that maybe there might not be a big Atheist graveyard in the sky. An utterly terrifying realization which might just change your whole worldview if you ever get in a better position to think about it.

She wasn't lying.

Long, spiked horns swirl up from the crown of her head, colored like a candy-corn and hardcore like the front of a 'Introductory Wicca' book. Teal light swims through the air from behind her glasses, clear even through your oxygen starved eyes. It's so bright, it pierces even the black of your lenses. She reaches, and it looks like time slows down around her as she does so, and from her gaudy red nails drip the same teal light. She grabs the head of the man currently holding you up, and she lets out a terrified, pained scream as she digs her claws into him.

He drops you, and you fall while taking the most satisfying breath you've ever had. Seriously, the sting of the ground is nothing compared to the utter relief you feel currently flowing through your nose. Hello carpet which smells like old Mountain Dew, meet Dave. You and the floor become best friends as you take a few, wheezing breaths until your vision comes back. You prop yourself up and look at the mess going on above you.

They're both utterly frozen minus the screaming coming from Terezi. The guy is still wearing a panicked face and holding his arm out, and Terezi is levitating in mid-air while latched onto the top of his head on his left side. She's lit up like a Christmas tree decorated by one of those older women who need all the decorations to be one color. Terezi sounds like these are her death throes, you're starting to get worried.

You are also, just maybe, a little bit freaked out by all this.

You stand up, slowly, fighting the wooziness. Your neck hurts even more now. But that's not important, because you found out that Terezi is not. actually. lying.

That means you have, in your life, sang along to Meatloaf in a car with an ancient, probably immortal being. All the Greek mythology you got drilled into your head in middle school falls into place. You have bantered with the fucking Hera of Texas, the jealous wife who turns her husband's lovers into spiders and shit. She tried to convince you to become an offering, some kind of subject, so she could get her powers back. It makes so much sense as you stare at the light pouring from behind her glasses that you start to think you're an idiot for not believing her in the first place.

But, wait, she said she was out of juice. How is she doing... this thing? Whatever she's doing?

She drops her hand, falls to the ground, stumbles on her feet. She clutches her head, and the light and horns fade away to nothing. The guy drops his arm like he's in a trance, then walks out the door with a jolted gait. He shuts it behind him, all stunted like, and you hear the crumbling of the concrete from the shitty stairs as he walks out the building. You look back at Terezi. She's clutching her stomach, bent in pain and wheezing.

You're not sure what to do, so you grab her around the shoulders and start to shuffle her to the couch. She leans on you heavily, and you can feel her burning up. She's at the same temperature you always imagined that sickly kid in _Balto_ to have, which is to say, ten thousand degrees. You move her so the couch is behind you both, and sit down.

She flops down with the enthusiasm of a dead fish, and immediately falls to her side, over your lap. In any other situation you'd be making a sex joke, but this time it's different.

"So, let me guess, you're the god of kidnapping, melting ice cream, and blowjobs." Dammit, you made one anyway.

"Hrck," she half coughs, half shudders. "Not close at all..." With a groan, she flips onto her back, her glasses slipping off her face. You pluck them off, and you know she's unable to see you judging by the way her pupils are rapidly vacillating in size. "God of... Justice, mind, and the senses. Soon to be... a dead god."

"Huh, that's random, what the fuck kind of civilization thought that one up?" your voice cracks a little. Shit, what do you do... "Don't answer that. What the hell did you do to that guy?"

"Edited memories. His friend..." she wheezes again. Shit. "Got into some debts, had to clear them up. Told him to... leave, go confront the friend... He will not be coming back."

You grab her arm as gentle as you can, like it's going to keep her alive or comfort her or something. She keeps talking. "I shouldn't have done that. I didn't have enough... Not going to... make it out. Unless..."

"Don't you leave that 'unless' trailing, Terezi 'you probably don't have a last name.' You very well goddamn know I'm going to help you." She did save your life after all, you might as well do a favor. Besides, her husband is still out there somewhere, don't want a raging god after you if he decides to go looking for his wife one day.

"I do, don't I?" she tries to take a deep breath, but she can't do it and it comes out in a screeching wheeze. You grip her arm. It's surprisingly soft. "That's why I went after you... You're too nice."

"Yes, wonderful, thanks for the backhanded compliment. Now what the fuck do you want me to do?"

"What I suggested in the beginning, but now... now it's not going to just be one little bite." she takes a breath, closes her eyes. "I'm going to need everything."

"Everything... of what?" Okay, fuck, if she wants to eat your brain though, you might just throw her out the window and be done with it.

She opens her eyes, tries her best to glare at you but her eyes won't focus. "Let's say, 'your soul' since that's the clearest translatable concept." she coughs. "You'll be utterly, unquestionably mine." she purrs the 'mine,' even through her slowly quieting voice. "You'll be the first and only subject I've had in the last... few millennia... and that comes with... perks... or perhaps curses..."

You know she's dying and you don't really have time to waste, but this sounds like a huge fucking commitment. As self-sacrificing as you are, you still need to goddamn look out for your own livelihood sometimes. "Perks?"

"You live... as long as I want you to." Immortality at the whims of some crazy god of justice? That doesn't sound like a perk. "There might... might be enough left over for you to control that a little, not... not positive what I need to eat."

There's so many questions you want to ask and not enough you can say in the brief time allotted to you, so you just say, "Uh..."

"You... also get... to use me as a channel. For clarity, emotions... matters of the mind... I can help you when you need me, when I deem your cause just."

Sweet, you get your own personal god to pray to. That sounds kind of rad. 

She gasps out a very strangled breath. "There's more but... but I can't remember..."

She's dying, this is it. Shit. What do you do?

"You know what, Terezi, I'm sad, depressed, and feel like shit, so you caught me at a good time. Sure, sure I'll fucking do this. What do you need?"

She tries to sigh with relief but it fails and comes out as a weak, harsh whistle. "Help me sit up."

You wedge your right arm between her back and your leg, then heft her up to a sitting position. She twists, then places both her arms sloppily around your shoulders, and leans in. Her forehead bonks against yours, and she puts all her weight on your shoulders. At least her eyes are closed, awkward eye contact would make this eerily close lapdance incredibly awful.

"Dave, whatever happens... You must not let go of me. I will get sucked back into my own... my own head, and I always... get stuck in the same scene. You. Have. To. Hold. On."

"I... uh, okay?"

"Open your mouth."

What the fuck is going on. You follow her command, despite every logical neuron in your brain telling you not to do that, and you feel her arm shift. She puts two fingers in, gently, against the side of your mouth.

"Say... something, anything," she says. She sways a bit. "Language is... is the gateway to the mind."

"Ish thish ewrotic?" you say around her fingers. "Becaush thish is kind of--"

When you blink, you're not in your living room anymore.


	4. Guns and Roses

The lighting is murky, muddy, green, like you're trapped underneath a swamp. Terezi's still taking up all of your vision, leaning against your forehead, but she's got her sunglasses on now. They scrape against yours as she takes a step back from you, and she's grinning.

Okay, cool, you're standing up, and she's wearing what is quite possibly the greatest damn outfit you have ever seen. It's this red, plush, monstrosity of a suit; you can see in clear detail the tacky velvet some Malaysian laborer probably sewed onto her lapels. It's perfectly tailored to her, despite looking like pajamas bought in the grodiest parts of the sale section of Wal-Mart, and is topped off with a black shirt and a white bow tie. She's got some kind of pin on the lapel too, a black circle with three little tentacle-y appendages growing off of it.

"Nish outfiid," you say. Her fingers are still in your mouth. 

"They are incredibly cozy! Thank you for dreaming these up for me!" she says. She points at you. "You're wearing something slick too, coolkid."

You look down, bonking Terezi's killer fingernails against the roof of your mouth. What you're wearing is similar, but instead of all one color, it's a white suit with black pants and a red bow tie. You look like a fucking garcon from the future who is also a deadly assassin. You take back what you said about Terezi's outfit, your suit is quite possibly the greatest damn outfit.

"Hell yesh."

"Now that we have analyzed our respective wardrobes, I suppose you would like me to take my hand out of your mouth?" 

"No itsh kindb of cozy in here, rike twho warm snuugry worms." Actually you don't mind it that much. Wait, no, if you develop a finger licking fetish you are never letting yourself live that down, talk about a terribly vanilla sexual hobby. "Nebermindb, tahke it oubt."

She cackles. "Can't! Because you're going to have to do it for me! This is where the 'don't let go of me' aspect comes into play. It doesn't matter how tight I hold onto you, if you're not willing to drag me through the innards of your mind I can't follow. Now, I want you to grab my wrist, and slowly pull it out of your mouth."

You do as she says, looping your thumb and the rest of your digits around her wrist, and pull it. You configure your mouth so it makes a 'pop' noise when you remove her fingers. There was no real point to that, you just wanted to fuck around. 

"Wonderful, Dave! A passing grade for you. Now, you're going to hold my hand, and we're going exploring."

"Fingers laced or cupped?"

"Ooo, laced."

"My second grade heart is beating so loudly I'm sure the whole bus can hear it." You take your right hand and interlace it with her own, then let go of her wrist.

She laughs. "This is a mental manifestation of yourself! You don't have a heart here." She spreads her free hand out away from you, in a 'behold! O holy land!' sort of gesture. You take a look at your surroundings.

You're in the grand entryway of a hotel that looks like it was built in the 1910s, then immediately abandoned. The owner must have gotten themselves into some serious gambling debts fast and hard, because there are so many holes in the ceiling its a wonder anyone ever stayed here. Unless if that was the point, maybe there was some kind of _au natural_ fad in the roaring tens, you don't know shit about history. Maybe the old-timers and their Gibson ladies liked to look up and taste the rain once in a while while they were checking in to get their rooms.

Actually, no matter how hard you focus, you can't really tell what kind of weather is peeking through the holes in the ceiling. Further on, when the hotel presumably has more stories, you can see the bottoms of dark rooms just fine, but the holes directly above you are a conundrum. It's sure... gray? out there? Are those clouds? Maybe static? The longer you stare at it, the more a very specific feeling builds up in you. It's the feeling you got when you started filling up this shitty _Soul Journal_ Rose bought for you, and lost yourself in the bullshit philosophical questions and wrote over twenty pages before you realized what you were doing. It was probably the worst self-exploration experience of your life and you had to take a cold shower afterwards. You stop looking at the holes above you.

The hotel has the same kind of color scheme, kind of gray, greenish, giving the impression that nature should be overtaking the abandoned building by now, but there's no flora in sight. As you look at the probably-red-at-one-point carpet, the chandelier with the dust over its diamonds, the scratched wood-paneled check-in desk, you realize this place might have been a fucking palace if someone took care of it. Hell, if you were a host on "This Old House" you would pay a fuckton of money to see this thing refurbished. It's got the potential to be swanky as shit.

"Let me get this straight," you say, looking at Terezi. She appears to be observing her surroundings with a ferocity akin to a carnivore at an all-you-can-eat steak buffet. "This is some kind of metaphorical representation of the inside of my head?"

"You got it!"

"Right, okay, not at all what I pictured the inside of my brain looking like. I was expecting, I dunno, lava, a red and black palette, maybe some cool steampunk gears because I'm a piece of shit..."

She skews her mouth up, clearly judging you. "That sounds like some kind of preteen action fantasy."

"I'm pretty much a preteen action fantasy, so it makes sense. So why..." you fumble for the words, opt for a gesture with your free hand instead. "... this?"

She "hmms" to herself, more for your benefit than for herself. "Because you're only as... hmmm, what's the word in English... Let's say, 'well-kept.' You are only as well-kept as you keep yourself, Dave."

You don't really understand, at face value, what she means, but something deep inside you lurches and you clutch your stomach.

You're only as well-kept as you keep yourself.

And you're a fucking shithole.

Homeless people wouldn't even sleep here.

You feel a pat on your back. 'Pat' is actually too nice of a way to put it, you feel a 'hard slap that could possibly be interpreted as a comforting gesture' on your back. You wheeze in pain, which brings to light the fact that you're not really breathing and you didn't really feel anything and your head was just telling you that's how you should respond. What the fuck. You stand up straight, knocking Terezi's free arm aside. She was crossing her arms uncomfortably to do that, that's nice of her.

"Don't worry, Dave, nobody's mind is perfect. You should see mine once I manage to get unstuck from the same spot!" She smiles. "Not today though, maybe another day. Or week." She taps her head, grinning. "Or in a hundred years, you never know."

Oh, right, yeah, immortality. "So what are we looking for again?"

"Something that represents the innermost core of your being. I eat it in a symbolic ritual, then you're my plaything forever." Um. She cackles. "Just messing with you! The object can be anything, ranging from an apple, to delicious pasta, to a brick, to half of a decomposed leg."

Your lip can't help but curl. Dammit lip, you're not even real right now. "You ate one of those?"

"Don't worry, it was a metaphor."

"Like your teeth?"

"Just like my teeth."

"How do we know where it is?"

"Usually the person who owns the specific mind knows where it is, or at least a vague idea of where it is. Think hard."

What the fuck. No. You stare at her, hoping she'll get the hint. She receives it with the most exaggerated sigh you've seen in your life. "Fine, Dave, fine. I bet there's a map around here, you're easy to read."

She points towards the check-in desk with the air of someone who is passively critiquing your flaws by pretending to be helpful. Rose used to do that all the time. Makes you wax nostalgic a little.

She pulls you towards the desk, your feet bringing up little puffs of dust against the old red carpet, and the floor creaking under your weight. Once you get out of here, you're going to have to put in some new floorboards or something because that wooden screeching sound is like a cheesegrater vigorously humping your eardrums. You're wondering how the heck you do home improvement on a metaphorical representation of yourself.

Well, okay, the answer is obvious, but it's more enjoyable to pretend to be Tim Allen from Home Improvement than to actually face your problems. Problems? What problems? You're Dave Strider and you don't have any problems, you've just got a low-budget Motel Bates under your belt because you're a shitty businessman and that's it. 

You peek over the edge of the desk, and indeed, there is a large map face up on the table, waiting for you. Terezi grabs it before you can take a closer look at it.

"Hey, maybe you should say the magic words before grabbing random shit inside my own head."

"Magic words?"

"C'mon do not tell me you aren't aware of that phrase. As a friendly neighborhood police officer you must have been to like, at least 60 elementary schools teaching them to mind their manners, not to inject pot into their veins, and be upstanding citizens of the United States."

"Oh, those magic words," she tries to smirk, but she's got too much mouth to pull it off and ends up looking like a lopsided jack-o-lantern. "You must mean, 'don't mess with me, I am an all powerful god?'"

"Yeah it was those ones, definitely. That is unquestionably what I was referring to. I am glad we cleared that up."

"Thank you for getting me to remember my manners, Dave! I will even let you look at this map as a symbol of my generosity."

She holds the big crumpled piece of paper out in front of you both, and you hold up the other side with your free hand.

"Huh."

"Hmmm..."

It's sure a map all right, in the way a charred chunk of burnt tree is a piece of wood. It's rather large, about as long as the combined one-armed wingspan of both you and Terezi. You don't have to extend your arm out way to the side to hold the map, but it's kind of a stretch to look at the thing as a whole. It's a two-floor monstrosity, with at least four thousand tiny-print rooms on each layer. You note that in fine print in the top left corner it says "basement not included," which means probably a third of this beast is a dark splotch of mystery.

Not like the rest of the map helps clear it up. None of the rooms are actually descriptions, they all follow some kind of color code. And by color code you mean: 'all 8,000 of these fucks have a slightly different shade of red.' There's no description, no vague lines implying furniture, nothing but red and the lines separating the rooms.

You see something like a key on Terezi's side, taking up the whole right edge of the map and labeled in very small font. She shifts the map over and you tug on the center bit, holding the key between the two of you.

Somebody spilled coffee over the center of it. Around two hundred entries are completely unreadable.

"Who the fuck is drinking coffee in my head? Is it me? Are there just, thousands of Daves staffing this? Hey, bellboy Dave, would you mind taking up Dave's luggage to Dave's room? Oh, and get Dave to bring up some wine for him."

"I'm sorry Dave, you were mumbling. What was that?"

"Nothing. What's the key say?"

You glance over at her profile, watch her nostrils expand like giant black holes. "I'll skim it, hold on a second."

You wait, listening to her inhale heavily. God of brains? More like, god of vacuums. Jesus, this girl must be so good at snorting coke off the bathroom sink. 

She hums to herself, frowning a bit. "While there is a particularly interesting memory about puppets I would love to investigate in the delicious blood orange scented room, I don't see anything pointing to what I need on the key." She smiles, looks at you. "You're very lucky I am particularly sensitive to reds, otherwise we would get rather lost."

"Yeah, we're no way in fuck going to the puppet room. I will drop your fucking hand if we go in there. " you say. Terezi does not look amused. "What now, then?"

"We could start with either the basement, or the two hundred rooms you spilled a vanilla mocha over." She hesitates, her lips open. "I should warn you though, since these places aren't on the map, you probably aren't aware you have them, or want to keep them hidden away. They might get rather... mmm, dark as licorice."

"And that puppets memory wasn't in those two hundred rooms? Wow, there must be some nasty shit stored in those things."

"Of course! I am very excited." She tugs on the map and you let go, then she lays it flat back down on the desk. She picks up a pen you didn't notice was there, then starts circling various rooms. Some ovals are individually drawn, small and out of the way, others are whole hallways, twenty five rooms in a row. "I say we check the rooms first, since we're here. The basement might get far trickier, and we might as well keep it simple to start off with."

You are not as excited. You can't think of any unholy Dave memory right now, but you are very certain there are things you want to keep 100% hidden from everybody forever. "Hey Terezi, not like I'm blaspheming against your holiness or anything, but I'm not sure what's going to be in there. Can I, like... imagine a blindfold or something for you until we find my disembodied leg you're supposed to eat?"

"You don't have enough control over your own head to do that. Besides, you already imagined my avatar as blind." Oh, huh. Well then. "Don't worry, if there's anything really disgusting, you can slam the door very quickly and I will pretend I haven't witnessed a thing. Even though I have. That's the beauty of it."

"Great, this is the day I'm going to find out I'm a huge dragon furry and we're just going to open room 6742 and a bunch of huge dragon dicks will fall on us and kill our metaphorical bodies."

Terezi shrugs. "I've had worse. Now, let's get started!"

You have absolutely no idea if she's joking or not and that's terrifying. What IF there's just a room filled with dragon dicks? Just thousands of four foot spiked monstrosities, ready to splooge on you. Oh fuck, what if just by imagining it, you made it exist. You glance over at the key as Terezi picks up the map. Yup, a teeny tiny red box just materialized at the bottom. Thank God/Terezi that one isn't on the list of exploratory goals.

"Looks like the first set of rooms are right up the stairs!" she says, and pulls you along, folding up the map so she can see the little sets of squares you're currently investigating.

The stairs don't creak as much, but the dirty gold leaf flakes off the banister as you run your hand up it. Note to self: no touching anything. Also purchase some new rare metals from the imaginary gold merchant.

The second floor has hallways spreading out of it like a spiderweb, at least six wings jutting out from the lobby. You remember from the map that there are at least three or four continuous hallways connecting those wings together horizontally at various points along the span. It's great that you don't have real muscles right now, because you'd probably get cramps from all the walking you'll be doing. You wonder how to get a monorail installed in this thing, like Disneyworld but less creative rides and more shitty Dave-related rooms.

She steers you to the left, stopping a few rooms in down the first hallway. "Want to open the door?" she asks. She's literally bouncing up and down with excitement. Wow.

Well, here goes nothing. You hope there isn't going to be just, some mass gay orgy in here.

You open the door while stepping inside. 

You're in your room, bed unmade, your swanky suit suddenly replaced by shitty boxer shorts, and Jade Harley fully dressed on the edge, her mouth in mid-yell.

"I am so DONE with your ironic attempts to help me! Please, I need you to be serious! Right now!"

You can't stop yourself, your mouth moves on its own. "You know me, I'm the frosty piece of light humor you need in a sad situation. Cheering you up with the whipped cream topping of delicious monotone sarcasm."

You hear Terezi snicker at you, you can just feel her senses bore into your three-quarters nude body, but you can't turn your head to look at her. The only thing you can do is squeeze and unsqueeze her hand. Which does shit.

Jade rubs her forehead, groans like she's about to start a round of drunken fisticuffs. This was about two months ago, after the third to last time you boned/went on a date. She snaps her head up, her mouth bellowing like the fires of hell. "Dave, I want to talk seriously! I have never, ever had a conversation with you where you haven't been..." She holds out her hands in a strangling motion, searching for the most powerful insult she can muster. "A total dweeb!"

Terezi says, "What an insult! A quality argument." She cackles as you start to say your next line.

"C'mon, babe, you love it when I make you laugh." You take an automatic step forward and pull Terezi along with you. Shit, you do not want to relive this memory. How the fuck do you get off this ride?

"Ooo, not good, Strider." says Terezi, laughter in her voice. 

Jade immediately drops her shoulders and rolls her eyes. "I'm serious when you need me to be there for you! But where's your support, Dave? I'm done! I'm totally fed up with these, these years of stupid conversations!"

You remember just shrugging her words off at the time, but re-watching this makes your soul cringe. You haven't even thought about this day after it happened, but now... You should have seen this breakup coming, should have done something...

"I am serious. Seriously hot. At least an 8/10. And those 8 points are usually enough to distract you from a case of the cranky." Why the fuck did you say that. That wasn't even funny, it just made you look like a pathetic, disgusting neckbeard boyfriend. You want to get off the Dave memory roller coaster before you are forced to ride down that plunge and think about your shitty actions some more.

Jade's silent, crosses her arms, looks at the Doritos stain on the floor you never cleaned up no matter how much she complained. You squeeze Terezi's hand frantically. Do something, Terezi, use your god powers to warp speed out of here mach 9.

She just squeezes back, and giggles. Fuck you too, Terezi.

Jade speaks so quietly it comes out as a whisper, but you know now she was just trying to keep her anger contained. "Is this even going to work out?"

No, no no no no no. No, fuck, no you are not going to live through this shit again. You're done, you're FUCKING DONE with this memory.

And control over yourself crumples back into you, and the memory flashes into an ancient hotel room, dusty seashell patterns on the bedspread. You grab at your abdomen, the plush waiter suit meets your palm and you groan. "Well, fuck."

"And that was only the first room!" says Terezi, as cheerfully as you expected. "Only one hundred and ninety nine more to go!"

You're about to say 'naw man, get me the hell out of here, I am done remembering Jade just let me be sad for a year and gain sixty pounds from an ice-cream based diet' but you recall that Terezi will die if she doesn't get her snack. You've never been a strong person, but hey, you're willing to chip into the soul-reserve for a friend.

Friend? That's a little... much.

"Here's a tip for next time: don't walk into a room you're not sure about. We can just peek in from the outside and smell the self-loathing from there."

"Seriously though, can you plug your nostrils or some shit? That was pretty heavy and I don't appreciate you ranking the quality of whatever past-me chose to say."

She smiles, gestures at the exit. "Oh, you're talking in past selves now? I knew someone who used to do that." You both turn, walk out the door. She holds the map up to her nose. "Why not just own up to your responsibility, and take actions in accordance with what you've done?"

"I don't care about owning up to it, yeah sure, Dave Strider is currently owning the fact that he's kind of a shitty dude. I just don't want to constantly think about it."

"Or at all?" She points further down the hall, it curves around slightly so you can't see the end of it. The thing is massive.

"Or at all."

She flips the map downwards, lowers her glasses at you with her free hand, gives you a glare worthy of the most noir of Old Hollywood. "No need to be so harsh, Dave, I'm just offering you a different perspective. Perhaps I relate to your situation more than you expect."

You trod down the hallway, trying to make your steps sound out cool and effortless against the rotting carpet, instead of angry. "Too bad that you broke up with your husband like, a fucking thousand years ago--"

"A few millennia."

"--and I... My relationship closed the book a whole, like, what, day ago? I'm not some kind of recovery machine, I can't just snap my fingers and have the breakup ice cream already digested."

"Yes, I do understand that, and sometimes I push it a little, but..." Terezi stops in front of a door, places her hand on the rusted doorknob. She gives your hand a squeeze. "You do need a friendly nudge to start down that path."

She pushes open the door handle, and you don't take a step forward this time. You stare inside, and let the smells and sounds of something the dark pit of your imagination thought up overtake you.

"... Is this an orgy?"

You search for the correct answer. There is none. "Yes."

"It looks like fun! Let's go in."

"Look, Terezi, there is no way I would be able to keep a grip on your hand while getting bombarded by six sweaty cocks. We are not going in there."

She blows a spitty "pfft" noise through her lips. "There aren't even that many dicks! And look, they're all paired up anyway. Even your darkest sexual fantasies are boringly vanilla."

You watch a well-oiled pair of abs attached to a dick censored like a hentai begin to softly fuck a vagina-equipped lady. They both look like they are comfortably enjoying themselves in lukewarm lovemaking. She's right. She's so right. Oh god, you're so... unflinchingly heteronormative. That hurts you.

"I've been in so many orgies," says Terezi. You stare at some woman who forgoes another pair of tits to go straight for the missionary position with a cock. This is it. This is your darkest fantasy you didn't know you had. This boring fuckfest is your arousal point.

Terezi continues on, completely ignoring your crisis. "I would have expected you to have some kind of odder kink, like puppets or incest."

"You know, everyone just jumps to that conclusion and I resent that."

"But this is even better. I can't believe you're into... a bunch of people in a room lovingly gazing into each others eyes!"

This is the most ironic thing you can ever accomplish in your life. This is it. Dave Strider: the kid you'd expect to be into dragon dildos and just turns out to have no fetishes at all. You almost shed a tear with pride.

You shut the door. "Okay, great, two rooms down. Where to next."

"Orgy room 2!"

"You and I both know I don't have one of those."

She sighs, looks at the map again. "There's a bunch of rooms in a row coming up, let's go into those."

The first door contains nothing special, a scene of your Brodad kicking your ass at a game of mock swordsmanship when you were 7. You're not even sure why you wanted to keep this hidden, must be some residual boyhood shame thing. Another door contains this sweet ass cyberpunk world you dreamed up when you were younger, where you were a catsuit wearing biker warrior with a hot babe as your hacker sidekick. Terezi has to stop you from entering that one, claiming you might get stuck in it. One room is just the feeling, the sheer feeling, of trying not to cry, and it hits you even outside the door frame. You shut it tight, and Terezi squeezes your hand. She doesn't ask about it. There's a memory of that one time when you where 14 and you got a boner while eating a Subway sandwich, and you have to wait for five minutes while Terezi tries to stop squealing with laughter while clutching pathetically at your hand. By that time, you're kind of over the shock of somebody seeing this kind of shit, and you stifle a very uncool laugh when she manages to stand up straight again.

Terezi looks displeased when you're done with the row of rooms. "Hmm, if we keep going at this rate, it will take hours before we find your core."

"Wait, this place operates in real time?"

"Of course! What did you expect?"

You think about this. "So, your finger is currently getting wrinkled like ignored laundry by the fine liquid in my irl mouth?"

"No way, I'm a god! What would even be the point of being one if I got wrinkles from getting wet!"

"A good question."

She taps her finger against her chin, frowning. "Are you sure you can't think of where your metaphorical center is? Because it would be much easier if--"

Her head snaps up, flicks to the right like she's a dog who just saw a squirrel. Her features go sharp and attentive, her hand grabs yours hard out of reflex. "Uh..." you say.

"There's a foreign entity here."

"What, like... a brain tumor?" Shit, you do not want brain cancer.

"No, like another one of us."

You glance around, panicked. You never asked how many gods there were out there, what if there are like, thousands or something? All up in your thoughts, learning how utterly boring your sexual preferences are...

"It's so..." she tilts her head, trying to smell it. "It's so small though, like it's barely there..." She turns to you, gripping your hand with both of hers. "We've got to go check it out! It might be someone I know!"

She basically drags you back down the way you came, and you can't say you're as excited as she is when it comes to finding out who your brain invader is. "Is this a 'me and my god pals' kind of thing?"

"Yes."

"How many of you are out there?"

"In our culture? There are only three left, as far as I know. I always suspected there were other mythoses that produced their own godlike figures, but I've never been able to find any others." She plods down the hallway, following the wall. "There were originally seven of us, two died by their own hands, and I personally..." she hesitates, her pace slows, but she doesn't look at you. "... killed the other two."

You aren't even going to ask. You have a feeling this hallway isn't big enough for that conversation. You make it to the second floor entryway, then she veers left to go down the center aisle of this hotel. Still as shitty as the rest of them. She keeps talking. "Of course, this foreign entity cannot be my husband! He was never a master of the... more subtle arts of rhythmically syncing up the minds. So that only leaves one suspect left."

She stops in front of a door on the left wall, shallowly set into the frame, wood cracking against the metal knob. She breathes with excitement, reaches out her hand, and opens the door.

What you see inside the plain, dirty old hotel room... 

Is your sister.

She's dressed in black, calmly sitting on the bed, eyes white and a sweet smile on her lips.

Foreign entity.

You let go of Terezi.

You remember the room filled with the feeling of holding back tears, and put all your will into keeping it there.

"Oh dear," says Rose, she raises a hand to her lips in an almost mocking concern. "I didn't mean to surprise you so much you would drop your blind guide."

You look to where Terezi was standing, and clench and unclench your empty hand. "Well, shit." 

She disappeared without a single peep. You were expecting her to get dramatically sucked away by the violent tendrils of her god mind, but you ended up not noticing her vanish. Really fucked up there buddy, you cannot imagine a worse place to be trapped in than your own head. You look at Rose. Rose, who you last saw all mashed up, all dead and mucked in that pitch black coffin, who now sits in front of you wearing a velvet ballgown.

You feel like you're ten, fumbling at words to impress an adult. "Are you real?"

She spreads her arms out. "Is anything real here?"

"Don't fuck with me, Rose," your voice comes out loud and cracked. You're losing it, fuck. Fuck. "You know what I mean."

Her smile falters, turns to a barely open-mouthed genuine concern, a rare face on her. Her spread arms open towards you. "I'm a little real. Just a tiny fragment who latched parasitically onto your memory of Rose."

If your mind is fucking with you right now, you are never going to forgive yourself. You rush her in the most jarred way, your hands fumbling around her frame to give her the goddamn goodbye hug you never had a chance to demonstrate. You squeeze her, arms wrapped around her back, bury your face in her hair, and bite your lip hard. She hugs back, just like you remember, all dainty and Victorian, but there's some strength in there you don't quite recall. She also smells like a bunch of flowers in the freezer and that's a brand new feature.

"How... what? I mean... what?" you mumble into her hair.

"You know my girlfriend?"

The tall one with leucoderma, you saw her once at a spaghetti dinner. "Yes?"

"Also a god."

You back up from the hug. "No shit?"

"You and I have got a lot in common, apparently." she smiles, and you never realized just how fucking much you missed black lipstick. 

You imagine a heart for yourself, and it's thumping with reckless abandon. "Does this mean you're..."

She shakes her head. "Oh no, I'm incredibly dead. I've just obtained..." she drops her arms from your back, and makes a rainbow motion in front of you. "... A higher form of consciousness, thanks to her. Infinite and lovin' it."

You keep your arms on her shoulders. "You are going to have so many candles on your birthday cakes."

"I'd invite you but you probably wouldn't like it."

"Yeah your birthday parties were always too stuffy and goffic anyway. I'm not an old broad yet, Rose, I'm still young and spry."

She laughs, her charming, true laugh. Fuck. "To make a long story much shorter, my girlfriend was forced to pick up cantrips from the other two deities you've apparently already met, and she taught them to me a little bit ago." She sighs. "Syncing up with your head was depressingly easy. I can't leave this room, but I didn't even need a Dave Strider escort to get inside."

"Of course you didn't need a damn guide, you were my go-to psychiatrist for like, twenty years."

"I just thought I'd pop in and say hello. I have to say you've done an excellent job of recalling a shell of my personality for me to use."

"You're welcome."

She looks around at the decrepit hotel room. "I also received a fair chunk of your recollection of recent events." She pauses, gets serious. "Dave... are you doing okay?"

"You very fucking well know the answer to that."

"I want to hear you say it."

You think about how you're clinging mercilessly onto Jade, you think about how you've lived since Rose died, how uniquely shitty you've felt since you stopped going to school, how the worst part about Brodad dying was how much it didn't hurt, and you say with unabashed certainty: "Yeah."

"Great, wonderful, class dismissed." Rose claps sarcastically. "A gold star for your unquestionably correct answer. You didn't cheat, did you?"

"You know me, I'm Honest Dave."

"How could I ever forget?" She sighs, rubs her forehead on her forefinger and thumb. "Alas, I would love to fill the role of your life coach once more, but my core is drifting away. I'm going to have to drop out of here."

"I... what?"

"Ignore it." She stands up, makes a shooing motion with her hands. "You've got to find your cute god."

You lower your glasses to give her a glare worthy of the best librarian. "And how the fuck do you suggest doing that?"

"Easy," she smiles. "You just have to find the thought, memory, or feeling that you would most like to share with somebody. That's how you connect to her own mind. There will probably be an entrance into her head through said room."

"Yeah, that is easy, it's the memory of a Chipotle burrito, extra white rice."

She facepalms. You love it when you make Rose facepalm. "No. Gods no. I don't mean, 'I, David Strider, would like to share a Chipotle burrito and some nachos because that is my idea of a good date.'" She pauses, puckers her lips in thought, and you notice the bottom of her dress start to vanish. "I mean something more like, 'what event or feeling would I, David Strider, most wish for someone else to experience.'" The area around her knees becomes transparent. "It doesn't have to be a memory that you want them to _know_ per se, just an experience you want everyone to have in their own respective lives out of the goodness of your heart."

You don't get it at all, but she's vanished up to her torso and it's going to get real hard and real quiet without her. "Wait, shit, will I see you again?"

You feel like an idiot from a Disney film after saying it, but Rose chooses not to comment on the outburst. "Of course, you're immortal and I'm hanging out in a particularly unique afterlife. We'll have plenty of fun times ahead of us."

And her head vanishes into a small Rose speck, and she's gone. You stare at the map Terezi was holding, crumpled up on the floor.

The experience you most wish on somebody? What the fuck does that mean?

You pick up the map, try to imagine a pen in your hand to cross off a room. It doesn't work.

Here's to hoping you get lucky, because your mind sure isn't going to cooperate.


	5. Some Phantasmic Shit Is Going Down Here

You navigate room after room, barely opening each door before you slam it shut without even looking inside. There are some purely awful things in there, some dark fragments of yourself you never want to dwell on, not even for the sake of dragging Terezi out of her own mind-castle. You get practice from this though. After a while, you start to feel those rooms before they come up in the long hallways, those black, self-conscious things, and you avoid them like a pope surrounding himself in fire to combat the bubonic plague. 

Hey, at least you now vaguely recognize things in your own head, right? That's a good sign, right? Like you're following down the zen path of 'know yourself' or some holistic bullshit like that. 

Or maybe your survival instincts are kicking in because it's been like 16 hours and your real body is probably dehydrated as shit. Yeah, probably that one. You hope Terezi's god powers cover this otherwise you're going to find yourself with an incredible case of 'dry-sock mouth' when you get out of here.

You open door 3012 which reveals a particularly charming octopus-themed dress you designed when you were three. It's fucking awesome. Three year old Dave: you coulda been a fashion designer. What the fuck were you thinking.

Although you're getting really tired of just opening semi-random doors. You've had to have gone through, what, at least a few hundred? Jesus, that is so many. You can't even count that high. Terezi better give you some kind of godly gift for this. Like blessed Hot Pockets.

You check the map, step in front of room 3021. Memory you most want to share with someone, huh? This better be the fucking one. It doesn't look any different from the others though, just a plain old door with a plain old rusty sign on the front.

You open the door, and when you recognize the familiar feeling of a thought-room you're supposed to avoid, it's way too late.

What you see stabs through your core so thoroughly, you're left stuck with your hand on the knob.

It's Jade. Jade Harley, in the wedding dress you dreamed up for her in a particularly vulnerable moment, currently riding a guy you knew in high school. Sweat drips down her revealed back as she goes full at it, white fabric crinkling loud with each motion of her body. Her muscled thighs ripple and she throws her head back, gasping for air with a sound you used to know all too well. The guy changes, turns into another old friend, gripping her ass as she pants and thrusts against him. He changes again, into a guy from your college, changes into some alternative looking girl, changes into Rose, changes into all the people you goddamn feared she was canoodling with. Jade pauses, her sweet breaths echoing throughout the room, looks over her shoulder, and smiles at you. 

You shut the door with the coolness of a coffin lid closing.

Oh God. Fuck. Fuck. You clutch at your throat as retches boil up in your fake lungs, and start to choke. Your knees give out and you crumple to the floor, and you barely catch yourself with your arms before you meet the ground. You heave into the carpet, trying to get something, anything, out of you, but you don't really have a stomach so you just end up retching up imagined air.

You -wheeze- Are -wheeze- SO DONE -wheeze- with your own bullshit.

Talk about heavy shit, man. Where the FUCK did that room even come from? Is it a metaphor? Wait, yeah, it totally is, you don't even know why you even asked yourself that. Just put the Killers on and call you 'Mr. Brightside.'

You might, just maybe, have a little bit of a problem with Jade Harley.

The first step to solving your problems is admitting them, or at least that's what intro to psych taught you at community college. Are you going to confront them? No. Hell no. You are going to go out of your way to NOT confront them, and you're going to start right the fuck now. You are going to avoid anything you're not sure of from now on like the goddamn plague, and therefore steer clear of any awful callbacks to the Jade Harley experience.

You stand up, wiping your mouth despite a whole wad of nothing ever coming out of it, and attempt to actually THINK for once in your life.

Memory you most want everybody to experience... What about that time you had a pigs-in-a-blanket bro picnic with John? No, no, that park had way too many bees. What about... listening to Rose's knitting needles clack as you played Gameboy games in your Christmas cat sweater next to the fire? No, that thing was itchy. What about catching that glassware set after the shelf randomly broke and you felt like Peter Parker in the only true Spiderman film? While you would totally wish that on everybody, that just doesn't seem monuments enough. What about...

Oh, of course.

Of course it's that.

And you know where exactly where to go.

You suddenly feel a little newer, a little shinier, like you're an old car that just got a long-needed polish. Your strides have purpose as you walk down the hallway, you've got no time for a cool swagger, you're on a goddamn mission.

You pass door after door, speed walking down the hallway at an 'exercising white mom' pace, and your swankass coattails fly behind you like a cape. Your fists are clenched, your abdomen tight, and is that... nervousness? Hey Dave, calm the shit down, you've got no need to be nervous.

You descend the steps of the grand entryway, right down the center, and you feel like the Grand Duchess of Russia meeting her subjects. You take a sharp left when you reach the bottom, following the dirty, diagonally positioned hallway that begins behind the stairs. Room 0060... Room 0062... Room 0064... Basement.

The sign is dingy, like it was never expected to be looked at so it never became presentable. It's hanging down on one nail, but there's something almost charming about the way it squeaks back and forth as you open the door. It's not creepy at all, in any other situation you'd be yelling at yourself to 'keep the damn door closed there is clearly a fucking Freddie and Jason inside who is going to eat you.' But you know exactly what's coming up, and there ain't a single boogieman down there.

You walk down the basement steps. There aren't too many, it's a shallowly built level, and end up in another mess of hallways. It's more cramped than above, the walls are narrowly squished together, and the ceiling is lower. But it's a little brighter and cleaner, the wallpaper patterned with lilies from the 50s, the kind Mom used to have in her old house.

This would be a hell of a maze to set a lab rat loose in. But hey, at least you know where the cheese is.

You take a left, a right, go straight at the fork, at the three-way too. Take that, erotically named intersections, you won't be getting all bendy for nothing.

You come to a bleached door, a little black knob with a fake crystal on the end being the only distinguishing feature. This is it. This is the only room in your whole damn mind where you know exactly what's inside. And you're ready.

You open the door, and walk in.

You're wearing your old dinosaur footie pajamas at nine at night, a bad dream still swimming around in your head, and clutching good ol' monk-monk in your arms. Brodad's at the old apartment kitchen counter in front of you, wooden spoon in a saucepan, the smell of Spongebob Kraft Mac and Cheese prancing like a ballerina dancer through your nostrils. It's heavenly ambrosia, a gift from the goddamn gods of scent, and you're pleased it's all just as good as you remember.

“Hey little man,” Brodad says, without turning around. “What movie are you feeling like?”

You're tempted to go with it, let the lines play out like you were eight years old, where you eat Kraft Mac and Cheese under a blanket with Brodad and watch Mallrats for the fifteenth time, then fall asleep and get carried to bed. Then you realize you're literally a twenty-three year old man wearing footie pajamas and decide some things are best left in your memories.

This is definitely it, the memory you most want to share with somebody. You want everybody in the whole fucking world to subject themselves to shitty mac and cheese in a shitty apartment with a shitty blanket with the shittest tenderness lavished upon them by someone they love. You wonder if Terezi ever got to do this, have paella or whatever the hell they ate back then with some kind of guardian figure under some cozy palm leaves. You get the sinking feeling she never got to experience that. Shit, that sucks.

Instead of replying to Brodad by yelling 'Mallrats!' like you did when you where eight, you take a step forward. “Sorry, Bro, I'm not feeling a movie right now, I've got a damsel to save. And by damsel I mean, 'toothfaced man-eater badass.'”

You don't expect him to reply, since this didn't happen in the past, but he surprises you. “Proud o' you, little man. Rescuing babes, getting over your problems, you go get her.”

He turns towards you, offering up a child's monkey-themed spoon filled with that bright orange macaroni.

You shrug. Might as well.

You take the spoon hosting the warm, primal ooze of the Kraft Mac and Cheese, and put it in your mouth.

It's the best food you'll ever goddamn have and you refuse to think otherwise.

You wonder if he's like Rose, if part of him's real or you just made up some kind of Brodad character sheet up for yourself. Watching him go through the motions of your memory verbatim after you set the spoon down on the counter tells you you're literally RPing with yourself. You can't tell if that's sad or you just have an incredible talent for RPing. You hope it's the latter one, you've always wanted to be a LARPer.

You step away as Brodad stirs the pot of macaroni, and you turn towards the fridge, the only door-like entity clearly visible in the dark apartment. You wonder what kind of place TZ's head is. (TZ? Good nickname, you'll keep it in mind) It's probably a BDSM dungeon. She's probably stuck in handcuffs or some shit and you've got to... Dammit don't even think about that, you'll make it a real place in your own head hotel and nobody wants that.

You open the door, and step through the fridge.

\--------

You are PISSED six ways to HELL, your baby girl, your light, your STAR OF YOUR MOTHERFUCKING LOINS, has just sinned, just failed, against THE HOLY MOTHERFUCKING CODE. Someone needs to teach that PRECIOUS FUCKING BABY GIRL a fucking lesson and--

_You try to find your thoughts, grasp at yourself, find your own persona in this mess of a being--_

\--that someone is YOU. The only true HOLY FUCKING JUSTICE in this sinful world. Not even your BEST FUCKING FRIEND can stop the triumphant rage creaking your bones and spurning you up the stairs to YOUR BABY GIRL OF A RIVAL. You--

_C'mon Dave, get it together... There you are..._

\--------

Oh, shit, okay, there you are. Whew. You shake out the last vestiges of... whoever... and try to figure out where the fuck you are and what the hell you're doing.

You're clearly in your own body, sort of. One incredibly difficult glance downward at yourself reveals the familiar neckbeard level of palidness of your own skin, so that hasn't changed. You've also got that comforting dark filter over your eyes, so it's safe to assume you've got your shades on too. You're glad that your accessory choice is apparently a vital part of your identity.

However, the ground is much farther away. You have apparently achieved Greek-statue level proportions; eight heads tall, all abs, and crafted from marble. Sweet deal.

You've also got this giant purple ceramic codpiece on, and the rest of you looks like the ICP decided to throw a 'native' themed concert. It's probably the worst outfit you've ever seen in your life and you feel angry just wearing this atrocity. Is that the point? Are you supposed to feel mad? Mad about the permanent faux boner you have, apparently.

Your head snaps up like you're stretching a old rubber band. While it wasn't too difficult to separate your own thoughts from, uh, whoever the fuck Terezi imagined you as, it is far harder to distance yourself from the actions of his body. He jerks up the curved stairs of the mountain path and you're pulled along helplessly like a puppetmaster trapped in the body of its own playthings. Wow, that was an awful metaphor, maybe you do have a thing for puppets. Shit, you would hands down take any other fetish besides that one. Yeaugh.

There aren't too many steps to climb until you get to her. You figure she couldn't have been too far away since, like, how the fuck could she be perceiving these events if she wasn't around? You end up on top of a plateau on the mountain, overlooking the rolling hills of some kind of rainforest. It's a little different than images of rainforests you've seen, looking out over the trees you can see patches with far more overgrowth than others, where old branches tangle together and knit into giant super-trees. The places that look more controlled are probably where settlements are, or something. You didn't take anthropology.

Terezi either didn't dream up noises to go along with the setting or some heavy climatic shit is about to go down, because it is dead silent despite being smack fuck in the middle of nature. You are pretty sure it's the climax one, considering what Terezi is doing at the moment.

She's instantly recognizable, despite the haystack dye job getting replaced by her natural jet black, with the addition of two long horns emerging from the top of her head. She's wearing a long, intricately beaded mesh dress, feathers sprouting out of the golden collar like one of those eccentric villain’s capes, and holy shit you can totally see her titties through that. That dress has so much cleavage it does a reacharound into 'no cleavage at all since she's pretty much naked.' Goddammit Dave, you're such a prude, you need to move on from your church basement grandmother moralities.

Her most distinctive feature is the long, trailing red blindfold wrapped around her eyes. Justice is blind, huh? Glad she sticks to her guns.

She's crouched over a dead body on the small plateau, her tears staining her blindfold with teal and her knees scraping against the rubble of the mountain. She sees you, or smells you or whatever, and snaps her head up as your host approaches.

“I'm sorry...” she pleads, barely a whisper. Her voice is odd, it mumbles in the wrong place and screeches in an even worse one, and it takes you an embarrassingly large amount of mental capacity to process that she isn't speaking English. You're not sure what mystical hobnobs are being applied to get you to understand, but you thank Jegus on high you comprendes, since this would be one confusing mind-hallucination without a translator. 

You wonder if she's speaking to the dead body, or to whoever you're piggy-backing. Her gaze is leveled directly between you and the body, and you're not sure if that's deliberate or she just needs a weird angle to get the right kind of smell-o-vision. Knowing Terezi, it's probably deliberate.

The body, lying perfectly face down in front of TZ, is a curved, dark woman, with a slick naked back a classical painter would kill somebody to draw. Her hair is long, and her god horns are asymmetrical, reminding you of a toolbox. An ex-god of... wrenches? Yeah, probably, that's probably it.

She's wearing some orange poofy shorts and not much else. There's no blood or anything, which is good because you're the biggest pansy on God's Earth and you would probably dream-faint if there was any hint of expelled bodily fluids.

Your bodily host walks towards Terezi with an awkward, dragging gait. The difference between your natural center of gravity and this dude's center of gravity is staggering. If you had your hands on the steering wheel here you would probably fall over and stay there like the old lady in the life-alert commercials.

She looks up at you hopefully, mournfully, and your heart swells three sizes too big. You understand that the face-down dead god, if she wasn't a good friend, meant a hell of a lot to TZ. You feel a sense of loss while staring at the stains on Terezi's blindfold, like you've been transplanted into her world and your empathy meter is going off the charts. You nervously grasp at the concept that that Terezi isn't all grins and sharpness, that she probably has many memories and experiences that you'll never truly understand. There are so many aspects of Terezi that you have a feeling you'll never fully know, and that cuts in places you didn't know you had.

You want to reach out, hug her, give her a comforting pat on the shoulder, draw something for her, make her laugh, something, but isn't your body.

You do reach out though, and you wonder for a split second if you somehow managed control.

Then you punch her full in the face.

Your tattooed, colorful knuckles smash against her cheekbone, crumpling into her skin, making a sloppy noise like a homerun in a rainstorm. Spit flies from her mouth as she jerks to one side, the fist of your host feeling the teeth snap shut around the inside of her cheek in painful reflex. Jesus, who the fuck are you even possessing right now? What a total ass.

She crumples to the ground, her palms making a cheesegrater noise against the rubble as she catches herself. You haven't seen a fall that hard since you got bullied in second grade. Skinned knees and old band-aids were nothing compared to that punch, though. 

Your other hand grabs her by a thick necklace, and hefts her up, dragging her over the body of the dead god. She's proportionately different now than how you originally saw her kneeling when you first started this nightmare ride. She's still got the 8-heads mythological thing going on, but whatever the fuck your host body is doing must have upped the ante to nine thousand, because she feels small as you pull her to chin level. Tears are waterfalling from under her blindfold, dripping down her cheeks in messy teal trails, and she's got stuff coming out of her nose in streams. No, shit, please, you don't want to hit her again. You don't want to hit your god. How can you stop this? You've got to stop this.

Your free fist pulls back, slowly, despite all your efforts to keep it at your side, and fuck, you're not mentally strong enough. Your arm hesitates though, like it's waiting for something... You sense another presence and shit fuck it's happening again--

Your consciousness splits. 

_You try to reconcile the two, quickly, but you feel the new character overtake the actor and you lose Dave Strider in the crowd--_

\--------

You are nine hundred levels of done with this utter farce of domestic neglect. It's just stacks of shit piling up on top of other stacks of shit at this point, all your problems rapidly converging into one disgustingly organized manure storage place and you just can't tell the difference between the fucking sacks anymore, nor do you actually care what animal they shot out from. You just want to get all of it out of the fucking shit shed so you can, fuck, maybe return to some basic state of normalcy. Not like you ever expected that in the first place, since your life is a saturated heap of overpowered foolishness. 

You're going to take a good hard look at these two assholes currently in the midst of some kind of divine battle, and tell them to drop the fuck out of it. Seriously, can anyone even fix their own problems without interference from their glorious leader? Ha, what an excellent rhetorical question, since their problems become yours and you just love to fucking meddle. Your wife, who has apparently decided that the way to stop her grave from becoming deeper is to dig more and has presumably broken through hell by now, is currently about to be punched by...

Hey, he doesn't look like that. What's with his face? Is that some kind of shitty attempt at a blindfold?

_That's you! You're YOU. Dave, get a grip, just wrangle up both these suckers by the handles and drive, ride 'em like doubling up on both DDR mats, like you used to do all the time._

_You might not have a lot going for you, but you're hella righteous at micromanaging._

\--------

You are now both god #1, currently gripping Terezi by the collar, and god #2, currently emerging from a poof of Hollywood-worthy blood. It's disconcerting to be watching the same event from two sets of eyes, but it's also incredibly entertaining to view two different angles of yourself. Or, your two different Terezi-brand god forms.

Speaking of which, Dave #2 looks fucking _incredible_. If #1 is something out of a racist ICP album, #2 is hard, disgustingly 80s, fantasy-themed power metal. Seriously, you look like you should be bursting out of a volcano on a white dragon while riffing a sweet chord on a red electric guitar right now.

You've got these wicked tattoos crisscrossing and zigzagging and polkadotting down your Dave-colored arms, and from #1's eyes you see the marks envelop your chest like some kind of intricate bird cage. You're as naked as an aviator-clad bro at an ultimate Frisbee tournament, the scant outfit you have on accentuating the highlights of your body. Aw, yeah, you love chiseled Dave. 

Wait, isn't this supposed to be TZ's hubby? Because the guy you bumped into looked like, the exact opposite of gritty muscled man. He apparently kept the magical tall-proportions thing, though. Fuck that, if it were up to you, you would have kept the muscles.

The best part though is that you've got many large, golden chains hooked painlessly into your wrists and arms, each link with a carved canal so blood can flow from your punctured veins through the slots. They all hook behind you to a long piece of red fabric, and as you're moved towards TZ by #2's body, #1 can see you leave a trail of bright red blood behind you. Now THAT is badass. You're assuming #2 has some kind of magic blood powers or some shit, otherwise you're going to bleed out faster than a prizefighter in a cock ring.

#1 demands an action. You feel like, and fuck do you hate this comparison, you're controlling two marionettes with one hand while the other frantically tries to set up the scenery and props. It's actually easier than being in just one body at a time, you can kind of just zone out and have whatever subconscious desire you have to be a mid-level manager take control of all the bodily organization aspects. Man, if you have a genetic puppeteering tendency, you are never going to forgive yourself.

Dave #1 and his glorious cockpiece is winding up for another punch straight for TZ's gullet. You can feel the muscles tense with rage and anger and you're going to stop this shit if you have anything to say about it.

Terezi gurgles out the words through the little throat space you left her. “Karkat-- save me--”

Save me? Whoa, whoa, whoa, what's up with this damsel in distress shit? You were joking when you said that before to Brodad, but you weren't expecting it to actually be the case. The Terezi you've met wouldn't have said that, she'd mindfuck this dude to oblivion and then curbstomp his braindead ass while yelling 'THE LAW WILL BIND' or some equally damning ultimatum. It's... kind of unsettling to hear her say that. 

God #2 steps up to the plate, and you know what you're supposed to say, you can already hear the foreignly formed vocal chords warming up. You're supposed to say something like, 'Hey bucko get off my gal,' but angrier and in some kind of unique mystical proto-language, and then have a big Irish standoff with #1. 

Uh, you just saw a little future there. What the fuck. Time to try that again...

#2 you is supposed to drive #1 you away in a seriously awesome magical battle, like it puts some mythological battle descriptions you've read to shame, and Terezi is supposed to come literally crawling to #2. And #2's supposed to like, fucking coddle her, and seeing the whole shebang play out in your mind just gives you this utterly bitter taste in your mouth. From what you can tell, this is where everything started going to shit, where her relationships started sputtering out and things got unhealthy and obsessive.

Okay, no wonder she gets stuck in this scene. It's a goddamn turning point. It's where she showed a moment of utter, raw weakness and fucked right the hell up. Well, everybody involved in this little debacle have probably fucked up many times before this, but this is the beginning of the long fall from grace.

Is she throwing some kind of raging pity party in her head for herself? Is that why she keeps reliving it? Why she can't move on? Well, you're detached and have no emotional connection to any of these fucks save one, and you're no stranger to throwing pity parties, so you know exactly what to do. It's time to blow this popsicle brain.

You concentrate hard, move all your willpower to #2's voice box, to your tongue and lips and everything in between, and say in the most Dave-y voice you can muster, “Nope.”

It comes out in English, but it's weirdly accented and twisted by the terrifying hybrid combination of god-being-part-Dave-throat. It sounds like you're trying to break out of a plastic bag. It doesn't help that every physical urge in Dave #2's body is on full alert, blaring red alarms informing you of the fact you deviated from the lines of the play. You're in full improv mode and that wasn't in the program. Whatever, the play kind of sucked anyway.

Terezi's mouth gapes at #1 like a fish out of water, and you can tell she's trying to say her next designated line. Sorry TZ, you threw a plot twist curve ball out of nowhere and she's going to have to catch it. You should probably be a good goalie and help her out (are goalies in baseball?).

You try #1's mouth, which is easier, but you still uncool-y jerk out the words. “Hey, TZ, I wasn't a psych major or anything, I mean, the best I got was osmosising that shit from Rose, but I think I can relate to enough of what you're going through to lay down some D Strides diagnoses.” 

You feel out #1's hands, gain control of the muscle you need, and let go of her gold collar. She drops to the ground like a sack of potatoes. You keep talking as #1, the words becoming more fluid. “I just want to say, I am empathizing the shit out of this right now.”

You have #2 step forward towards #1 and Terezi, decide to speak through him for a while. “I thought it was kind of bizarre that you weren't over this dude after like, a godzillion fucking years, but I think I get it now. I honestly, truly, from the bottom of my pitiful Strider soul, get it.” You switch to #1, for kicks. “I don't know what he hell kind of debacle is going down right now, from what I can tell it's some kind of grand mythical climax that unoriginal kiddies tell around the campfire or whatever, and I can only assume that what comes next is a burst of semen directly cannoning out of your ear to create human life, because literally everything I remember about mythology involves an insane amount of jizz.” Okay, getting tangential, switch to #2. “But I think I get the general gist of it.”

You decide to reach out to the third, currently unoccupied body, just to see if you can. It's surprisingly easy to take over another dream body, make her into another Dave...

You have Dave #3 sit up behind TZ, in all his shirtless glory, and say. “This is where you fucked up.”

Terezi finally shows some sign she's not getting pulled along haphazardly through her own memory. She whips her head around, frowns, and waits for you to continue. Your words are pretty much rolling off your tongue independent of you, by now. You've got a feeling you need to hear this as much as she does. You switch to #2.

“Well, TZ, this ain't going to make you feel any better, but I can guaran-fucking-tee that you have fucked up not just in this one instance, but many times before this too. You have probably fucked up gradually like a big ball of fuck rolling down a hill of minor fuckups, and this is just the ramp of utter fuckup that the ball has now cannoned off of. It just so happens that your ball, like mine, has ramped off the back of a breakup with somebody we really cared about into self-hating-ville.”

#3 again. “But that doesn't mean you're a worse person... god... thing... because of that.” Are you talking about her or about you now? If Rose is still chilling in your brain she is probably having a field day. “Because while you've been sliding down this slope to the climax of all great mistakes, so has everybody else in this whole world. Once everybody's at the bottom of the hill of fuckups, we've all grown bigger and different and distant and, hey, we've changed. And when you look back up at the top, maybe even years and years after you started rolling down the hill, it's so easy to see where all those regrets started sticking to you. Where you went off the ramp.”

You switch to #1. “And you'll say shit like, 'oh, I should have avoided that there...' or, 'oh, I could have done that to avoid breaking up with her..' and you'll keep picking yourself apart forever if you're not careful. And yeah, sure, you can forget you're smathered in terrible mistakes and guilt-ridden memories for a while, but it's going to whack you hard later as you start to roll down another hill. The only thing to do is just, keep on rolling, I guess, and pile on the fuckups until you're a smooth, mature ball of fucks who knows how to embrace their own damn problems.”

You take a deep breath from all three bodies, which is the dumbest thing to do ever but you felt it entirely necessary. They're all imaginary beings anyway, and you're literally just some kind of consciousness floating around in whatever you can possibly possess, so it's like, pointless times three. But whatever, you deserve that fake air, dammit.

Terezi blinks at #1, turns her head around at all of your selves. With all the regal godliness she can muster, she stands up in the middle of all these fucking Daves. It looks like some kind of epic slow-mo sacrifice scene in a movie, her blindfold swishes in this dragging billowing motion behind her, her thighs ripple under her dress, and she looks eight heads tall again. The scene around you fades into a silvery, teal mist, like warm steam coming off a hot tub. She begins to slow clap.

“Dave Strider, that was AWFUL.”

All Daves respond at once, your control slipping. “Hey, fuck you, I deserve an Oscar for that insightful speech. I should be fucking knighted.”

She wiggles her hands like she's turning some doorknobs, and you get vertigo as all of you is forcibly shepherded into one body. You're in front of her now, wearing your plain old shirt you threw on before this whole adventure started, and feeling mighty insignificant in front of the statuesque goddess known as Terezi. She grins down at you, all usual teeth. “I might give you that last one, as a thank you. You are now Dave Strider, super high priest and double-justice knight commander of all of my realm!”

She gets quiet, her smile fades away, and she shrinks into her dragon tee and normal sized Terezi. Her glasses are back on, straw dye job fully applied without touching the roots, and crocs equipped. “But, I really do mean it. Thank you. I've been stuck there for... for a long time. What you've said, I've known that. I've known all of that, I've heard that advice, I thought I'd taken it to heart.”

She smiles, quirked up at the edge. “I suppose I needed someone else to say it. A validation. I'm not fully recovered, by any means. But I...” She pauses, looks around like she's afraid someone's watching, and then places a hand on your cheek. It's warm, tender, like she's blessing you. “You know, I like you, Dave Strider. I'd like to hang out with you!”

“Sure, I'm down. Hope you're into board games.”

She grins. “I murder at Monopoly.”

What? Lies. “Nobody can murder at Monopoly. It takes like eight hours to play. I don't know what kind of murders you're pulling but mine don't take eight fucking hours.”

“I play with totalitarian rules! The superior government system.”

You can never tell if she's joking or not, and you guess that's part of what you like about her. “I dunno, I'm a commie myself.”

She trails her hand down your cheek, your chest, your arm, and grabs your hand. She laces your fingers again, but this time it actually feels like... like a thing. Intimate. It'd be nice if it were, you know, not taking place in some kind of imagination conglomerate. Are you... are you into her?

She tugs at your arm. “Dave, it's time to go get what we came for.”

Oh, right, that. Without thinking about it, you reach out and grab the handle of the fridge--

\--and step through into the basement hallways of your head.

There's a brief wave of disorientation as you adjust to the flower wallpaper. “What the fuck. Am I seriously getting the hang of this? Where did that even come from?”

“Did you say something? You were mumbling.”

“Nope, not a thing.”

She squeezes your hand as she twirls in front of you, the long hallway stretching out behind her. She's got the suit on again, you're glad your headscape outfit choices are cool and consistent. “So, Dave, it appears you've become suitably comfortable with your own mind! Which I'm also thankful for, since you have managed to overcome your struggles and find me!”

“Hell yeah, I'm navigating this shit like a pirate in a hurricane.”

“So, I'll ask again. Do you know where to find your core?”

You think about it. “No.”

Terezi crumples her mouth to the side. “Oh, come on. Spend more than five seconds on it!”

“Man this is some real yoga shit, like, 'downward dog and find your core.'” You debate actually doing a downward dog but decide it would be too hard to keep holding on to TZ while sticking your ass in the air. “I don't even know any yoga.”

“It's easy,” a grin, like she's rewarding your effort. “Just relax and take a deep breath. Focus on not focusing.”

“Right-o. Just let me suddenly transform into some ancient meditation mountain guru. No big.” You close your eyes, though. Take a deep breath. What the fuck is she even thinking with this advice, like it's that easy to turn your overactive mind off. Okay, shit, focus on not focusing, just focus on the blackness underneath your eyelids...

Imagined color swims in the darkness. Another breath. Exhale. Inhale. Deep breaths.

You open your eyes.

“I think it's that way.” You point down the long hallway, your hand shooting up without any input from your conscious thought. “I think it's pretty close.”

“Excellent, keep it up.” She gives your hand another squeeze, causing warmth to shoot your arm. “Would you guide me?”

“I'm the best damn guide dog you could ever ask for. I'll lead you across busy city streets without once getting your suit splashed by a stray puddle.”

“You bark a big game, guide dog!”

“Of course, babe. I'm the shit.” You start the walk down the hallway, gently tugging her along. It's different this time from when you were finding the memory with Brodad, this feels more like intuition, like you're playing a card game where you know everybody else's hand but you've got no idea what's in yours. 

You turn left, take a right, stumbling along as you try to keep zoned out. You're not sure which way you're going until your feet slow against the white tile, come to a halt next to a perfectly average door.

“Is this it?” asks Terezi.

“Dunno. Let's try it.”

Well, you're not getting a bad feeling from it, so it's probably not filled with gloom and darkness and bad memories and shit, right? Eh, whatever, you'll be able to face it. Besides, TZ's with you now, and she's kind of like the blankets that keep away the monsters after bedtime.

And, for hopefully the last time, you open the door.


	6. What Kind of Fruit is Blue Anyway?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for reading! I very much appreciate all of your wonderful comments. 
> 
> Please enjoy the last chapter of Bat Out of Hell.

It's a tree. A large, empty room with a tree growing up straight-shot from the middle of the broken concrete floor. Roots have cracked up through the grayness, causing drab dust to pile itself in-between the many jagged, wooden knots. Branches covered in healthy green leaves flood the ceiling, breaking through the next floor and the roof above, sending imagined sunbeams cascading down to your feet. As you enter, some unfelt wind shifts the leaves, and scattered yellow shadows rustle along the floors and walls of the decrepit gray room. 

"Not gunna lie here, not what I expected." you say. "Are you going to eat a whole tree?"

Terezi cackles. "Of course not. Trees are quite common as a stronghold for the core!" she pats your arm to comfort you due to your apparent mediocrity. "It's what grows on them that's important."

You walk towards the tree. You're probably the conceptual opposite of a naturalist, but you think this might be some giant-ass oak. Wait, fuck, no, you actually have no idea. Brodad never made you join Boy Scouts. "Have you ever eaten a tree though? I really want to know."

"... Yes. Unfortunately." She's solemn as she says that. Yeah, you probably wouldn't want to remember eating a whole tree either. Sorry TZ.

You lead her around the base of the tree as Terezi tilts her head towards the branches, trying to find your core. You help her up a particularly large root as you circle towards the back. Wonder what she's looking for in particular? Like, an apple or some shit, maybe. Adam and Dave, yeah, sounds right. That's hands down your favorite Sunday School story.

She makes this little 'ah!' noise close to the trunk, and _oh sweet god on high_ that was a fucking cute noise. Dammit, you're losing it. Thinking some bloodthirsty maneating god is adorable? Is this who Brodad raised you to be? Is this the man he wanted you to become? Yeah, actually. Probably.

She stands on her tip-toes and sticks her hand up and around a low, thick branch, and you hear the leafy noise of something getting plucked. She pulls it down and holds it in front of you.

You look at it. "How do eggs grow on trees?" you ask. "Did somebody plant a chicken in here?"

"Possibly!" she says, pulling the egg towards her face. It's... surprisingly ordinary, despite clearly being pooped out by a really fat mamma bird. "If anyone did plant a chicken here, it would have been you."

"I would have totally planted a goddamn chicken in my brain."

"I know."

Her face gets sullen as she concentrates on the egg. "Dave... is this really okay? This is a very large commitment. And not one to be taken lightly! I want to make sure you understand the consequences."

"Hey, yeah, don't worry TZ, I get it. Yours 'till we part or whatever. But I don't want you to die when we get out of here. I don't think..." Whoa, gettin' real deep here, Strider. "I don't think I could deal with myself knowing I let somebody die." You scramble for a joke. "'Somebody' meaning, an ancient relic that belongs in a museum. I'm really helping out cultural preservation efforts by keeping you around. Besides, I kinda like you."

She opens her mouth slightly in thought, then begins to laugh. "Dave Strider, you are too good for me."

"Naw, hun. I'm a piece of shit too."

She takes a step closer to you. "Well then, it's time to eat! I would like it if you held on to me. Something this delicious can't be appreciated with just one hand!"

You wrap your free arm around her waist, then let go of her hand, moving your other arm to middle school dance position. How romantic. There's room for like, six Holy Ghosts between you two, the chaperones will definitely be pleased. "I dunno, raw egg doesn't sound that good to me."

She steps closer, her raised hands holding the egg barely fitting between the two of you. Well, there goes innocence, flying off into oblivion. The PTA is going to be pissed. "Oh Dave, there might not even be a yolk inside."

She grins, tilts her head back, and takes a large bite of your soul.

You were expecting to feel something, but the only emotion that rushes through your body is the utter fascination with Terezi. Her teeth easily plowed through the thin eggshell, sending the blue (blue?) contents gushing into her mouth. She smiles peacefully, despite the fact that she is eagerly running her tongue over her lips to catch any driblets that didn't land in her chomper. It's horrendous. She's perfect.

"What's it taste like?"

She smacks her lips, tilting her head back down and carefully balancing the bottom of the eggshell and the remaining thick blue stuff in her hands. "Like a blue-raspberry slurpee."

"Amazing."

"I was certain you would be cherry! This comes as quite a shock."

"Naw, of course it's blue-raspberry."

She tilts her head back again to finish it off, but she doesn't just stick the whole rest of the thing in her mouth. She downs most of it, her sharp teeth making quick work of the slight crunchy bits and half-frozen slush, but leaves a small bit of eggshell on the tip of her finger. That bit must have contained a hell of a lot of delicious blue-raspberry nectar, because it starts to dribble down her hand. She holds her finger up to your mouth.

"Want some?"

You cross your eyes to look at the small piece she left you. Man, all that soul juice is going to drip onto the floor. "Isn't this like, cannibalism? Self-cannibalism?"

"Yes." she says. "If you want to eat this, anyway. I don't need this tiny little bit, besides, it will give you leverage to opt out of service in case I go crazy with the long march of the ages!"

Well, it's not every day you get to eat your own soul. Besides, you're going to be fed like a sexually constrained upper class man in a gay bar, dammit, or you're not going to be fed at all. You open your mouth, and she pops the eggshell in.

You cautiously chew the piece of... egg... in your mouth, and swallow it.

"It doesn't taste like anything."

"Of course it doesn't! You can't taste your own soul, it's like tasting your own mouth." You watch a little drop of blue run down her palm. Like hell are you wasting precious bits of your soul, you're going to clean that shit up.

You keep one arm around her waist while taking her wrist with your other hand. You pull it towards your face and Terezi tilts her head and makes this expression like '?'. How the fuck is her mouth even doing that. Seriously. She holds her palm flat out in front of your face, like she's going to slap your forehead.

You stick out your tongue, place it at the top of her wrist just where the lowest drop of juice is, and start to lick upwards. Your plan is to make it fast and easy, so it's not awkward for literally every party involved.

But that's not how it happens. At all.

Despite urgings from the rational part of your brain to not be a total fucking weirdo, you slowly, very slowly, savoring each line in her skin, run your tongue up her palm. You glide up the trail of juice seeping down from her fingers, and follow it all the way up to the tip of her middle finger. You press against the shallow gorges, and suck in just slightly.

Terezi half moans, half giggles.

_Oh god._

What the FUCK are you even doing?

You are SO into this. You are unbelievably, incredibly into this. You have lived your entire life without a fetish, living peacefully with your cabinets full of vanilla extract, getting boners at the smell of manilla envelopes, and you've finally found it. Your leathers and whips. And it's fucking finger sucking.

You're not even the one receiving it. You're such a fucking chump, out of all the kinks you could have possibly chosen from, ranging from vore to incest, your subconscious decided to go with fucking finger licking. You hate this. You hate everything.

Okay, not everything. This is kind of awesome. You move to another one of her fingers, making her giggle again when you follow through with your tongue. Jesus FUCK it's like you're inherently good at this too. Were you destined to give blow jobs or something and your psyche just mixed up its cylindrical body parts? 

There's not even juice left anymore but fuck it, you like it and she's liking it and you're getting off on her liking it, so you keep going. If it's not clear to Terezi by now that you're sinfully enjoying this then you have vastly overestimated her intelligence. Her giggles get louder as you run your tongue over the sensitive pad of her ring finger.

If you don't have a boner IRL you'll be severely disappointed with yourself. Your dick is probably the Washington Monument right now, you are THAT into this. Can you blow your load in your head? How would that work?

You go for her pinky, but she folds her hand into a fist right before you can get into it. "Dave, as entertaining as this is, I think we should get out of your head before we've gotten too used to it."

"I... uh, sure." Fuck, you're stuttering. "How do we do that?"

She grins again, the kind of grin that says she's got in on some joke at your expense. "The same way we got here."

You open your mouth, maybe a little too quickly for a coolkid, and she slowly moves two fingers inside. You gently close your lips around them, and resist the urge to make out with her goddamn digits.

"Say something!"

It comes out before you can help yourself. "So thish WASH ero-"

You're back in your apartment, Terezi straddling you with her dragon shirt and fingers in your mouth. "-tic." She removes them with a wet pop, then wipes them on her pants.

Your foreheads are still touching as you return from mind-ville, but she backs off before you can enjoy the extreme close up of Terezi's beautiful noggin. Her fingers flutter against your shoulders as she shifts against you and, oh goddammit you do actually have a huge boner right now. Fucking hell.

"I feel excellent." she says, rolling her shoulders. She doesn't get off you. "It's been a long time since I've been so full up on power."

"I'm assuming that means you're not on the brink of death anymore."

She grins. "I might get there if your dick keeps stabbing me like that. Ow."

She still doesn't move though. Dammit Terezi, why even complain. She continues. "Do you know how long it's been?"

"About 24 hours," you say. You grab your phone off the arm of the couch to double-check your estimate. Damn, you're off by an hour. John snapchatted you back with a picture of himself frowning with 'what the fuck dude?' beautifully captioned in the center. You screencap it.

You glance back up at her as you set your phone aside. "So, what now, TZ? Gonna go run off and find shouty now that you've got your heroin fix?"

She lightly shrugs, running her hands along your shoulders. "You know, it's suddenly not that important to me anymore! I'll see him when I see him."

"Que sera sera."

"Besides, I've got..." she trails a finger down the side of your face. "... More interesting things to do with my regained powers."

Her touch sends these weird, foreign waves coursing through you. They make you feel like you're getting ultimate air on a shitty skateboard while flying dreamily out of an exploding building. What a weird fucking mix. It feels _awesome_.

It is also probably the clearest solicitation for sex you have ever experienced. 

You can't suppress the dumb grin that spreads across your face. "Tell me more."

"Of course!" She runs her fingers up and down your face. "I've have everything from perception manipulation--" your arms wrapped around her waist become hyper aware, every fold in her t-shirt, every cell in her skin, every pump of her blood is picked up by your nerves. "-- to emotional amplification--" adrenaline rushes through you, causing a very uncool peep to escape from your mouth. "-- to outright control." Your hand raises on its own, detaches itself from Terezi's waist, and plants itself square on her left boob. Fuck. Yes.

You can barely talk at all you're so giddy. Keep it together, Dave, you've got a hot lady to please. "Fan-fucking-tastic. And I mean that. Any special VIP perks left for the high priest of the church of TZ?"

She thinks on this, bites her lip like a coy film noir star but with terrifying teeth. She leans closer to you, pressing her left boob into your hand (Yeah! Fuck yeah!), and your two pairs of sunglasses clink together. "An oral blessing, direct from the mouth of your god."

You're debating whether she means kissing you or giving you a blow job when she does the former. Which is good because you don't think your dick and her teeth are ready for a committed relationship at the moment. 

As she kisses you, there's something oddly innocent about the way butterflies well up in your stomach, something that brings you back to first times and touches and crushes and it's totally unexpected. You feel like a twelve year old holding hands with a girl for the first time, all giddy and jumbled inside. This is ridiculous, you are an adult who is at this point going to have wild rebound sex with a girl you rather like, there is no need to be nervous.

Your tongues start doing things that are left to the worst of the worst harlequin novels. Either you're bad at making out and she's humoring you, or you're both ridiculously terrible, or she's just into sloppy shit, because this is some intense face sucking. Wow. That feeling doesn't go away though, like you're standing in the spring rain. No, wait, better metaphor: like you're covered in blood and gross memories and the downpour is just cleaning your skin.

You run your hands up her shirt, and tingles shoot up your fingers as you touch her. Jesus fucking shit, you have NEVER felt like this. Well, okay, you have, but not this intense and not all at once. You feel like you're being baptized every time she smooches you.

You break contact, wipe the spit off your mouth. "Terezi, what is this? Are you feeling this?"

She strokes your hair, making you shiver. "Yup. Just subconscious amplification, I'm making our own emotions bigger. It's a perk for favored subjects!" She grins. You see the tint of a red blush on her cheeks. "I can turn it off if you want."

"No, hell no. This is great." You kiss her neck and she sighs into you, and color swirls in your vision. "Damn, this is some fantastic therapy sex."

She nudges your head with her cheek, so you end up looking straight at her. "Is this sex now?" she raises an eyebrow.

"I'd say so."

She sits straight up, grinning, breaking contact. "So, my high priest, my most important champion, my holy knight: I have my first divine command for thee!"

"My goddess, my patron, the fucking light of my weeping loins: What would you have of your eternal servant?"

"Take me to the bedroom!" She gestures helpfully behind the couch, where the bedroom is indeed located.

"I prefer to call it 'the pleasure temple.'"

"Then take me to your den of worship, and be pleased in faith!" She grabs your collar, pulls you to her face, and all those teeth line up in a row and they shine like fucking diamonds. "Lets DO IT."

"I am going to put my cock in you." you whisper.

"That is the hottest thing I've ever heard."

"I know."

\--------

She's good. Really good. Like ten millennia of practice good. You feel a mix of inept and flattered in the back of your head the whole time, and you're pretty sure she likes it that way. She laughs basically the entire damn time, and 100% of it is heartrendingly earnest and joyful and utterly contagious. By the end, you're giggling like an idiot too.

It's not exactly the most intimate, slow experience that you're usually into, but it definitely takes the top spot of 'most connected you've ever felt with someone.' Even taking into account the fact that you are quite literally connected in at least three places at any moment, you're positive this is still #1. Like, damn, that's as connected as a full up power strip.

You're absolutely sure this girl's going to be the death of you one day, and you don't even mind.

\--------

An alarm set for noon wakes you up, and you wonder why the fuck you have that thing set. You flip over on your side towards TZ, gently slipping your arm under the sheets and touching the smooth curve of her waist. Her eyes are closed, her mouth partially opened, and you can't help but stare at the rare glimpse of Terezi's relaxed face. Damn, you picked an excellent god. Who likes you. And will apparently sleep with you. Always a bonus.

Her eyes flutter open, and she smiles. Oh no, your heart is melting for the fifth time in three fucking days. "Did I wake you up, sleeping beauty?"

"No! Justice never sleeps."

You blink. "Wait, what? Seriously? You were just lying here, watching me snore, for ten hours?"

She cackles, and it's lighter and chirpier than usual. Appropriate for the morning. "Sort of. I can't really sleep, but I can kind of... hmm, turn off for a while. Unlike my other cohorts, who have these abilities fully functional, I am unable to rest for very long amounts of time! I usually just vigilante fight crime at night."

"That's fucking awesome."

"I'll take you along sometime if you want." She reaches across you to grab her glasses from the bedside nightstand. "I have a good feeling you and I will make the most excellent of justice-related duos."

"Hell yeah, just call me your paladin and I'll switch to Lawful Good for you."

"Alright, Mr. Paladin! Let's go fight some crime." She puts her glasses on. You grab yours from the same spot. "But not right now. Right now I could go for some ice cream."

"Yeah me too." Oh yeah, you never got to have that breakup ice cream. You're not as motivated anymore, but hey, you can always go for some delicious frozen cow lactate. "I say we get two gallons and eat it all for lunch."

"I'm so glad my holy knight is a chef."

You silently nod, try to restrain a smile, fail, and hide it by kissing her hard.

\--------

You drive to a different gas station this time, for fear of having to talk to the weirdo mermaid manager again. Once you get inside, you see the Slurpee machine right by the entryway, and suddenly feel like blue-raspberry. Does that mean something? Head-Rose, what does it mean if you want to taste the deliciousness of your own self? She doesn't answer back but you figure she'll leave a note or something.

"Hey TZ, I'm getting a Slurpee. You go pick out somethin' nice for yourself over in the ritzy ice cream section."

You point to the back of the store, where the freezers line the wall. She salutes you. "Sure thing. Don't get brainfreeze, coolkid." and half-skips, half-walks to the back of the store. You watch her disappear behind a tall shelf of snacks.

So, wait, should you actually get the blue-raspberry? On a scale of 'one' to 'trying to go back to the dragon dildo room in your brain,' how fucking weird is that? At least like, a five. Maybe you associate blue-raspberry with finger licking now. That's just mildly uncomfortable. Maybe you should get cherry for posterit--

Your thoughts are interrupted by the gas station door slamming open. 

"I thought you said you knew how to get northbound, shitface!"

"Well, *sorry* asswipe, did I ever fucking say my domain was urban development? Because I am pretty sure my statement was only applicable to the innocent land unfondled by inappropriate mortal touches!"

Well. These are definitely the last two people you have ever wanted to see again in your life. These are, in fact, the last two people you have wanted to see again in your life walking into a gas station _together._ Like, what the fuck. What the absolute fuck. There is no way there could ever have been a believable series of events that led up to these two meeting, then waltzing into the same exact gas station where you and the other evil-ex are getting ice cream after fucking a lot. What the fuck kind of deity did you piss off in the past to get _Jade fucking Harley_ and uh, _that other guy whose name you should really remember by now but it keeps slipping away from you_ double teaming up to walk into your life again. Must have been a real powerful one. Maybe you made Rose's boo mad or something.

They both look like absolute shit too, Jade's got dirt all over her clothes, nature in her hair, and a huge rip in her leather jacket. TZ's ex looks worse, like he just woke up from a nap in a wood chopper. This isn't _Fargo,_ you can't do that in public here.

They haven't seen you yet, and your first thought is that you should hide behind the Slurpee machine. But you realize, with a very warm sense of relief, that you honestly don't care enough to do that. That's... kind of cool. A day or two ago you probably would have had a mild panic attack in this situation, and look at you now: the shining example of absolute apathy. Brodad would be proud.

Besides, it'd be really funny if you snapchatted John right now.

Jade sees you first, stops the sentence "You never said-" in favor of dropping her mouth open and gaping in ill-concealed horror. Ha. Yes, good. You whip out your phone.

She recovers pretty fast, puts on one of those fake salesman smiles, and stutters painfully through an introduction. "Oh, uh! Hi Dave! Um, this is," she holds her hands out towards the mess that is Terezi's ex. "Karkat! He is a g-... guy. A guy! One of many."

You watch Karkat double facepalm through the screen on your cameraphone. You wait until he pops his head up to squint at you to take a picture. He's looking at you like he's confused that the two of you exist in the same place.

She keeps going. "So we're just in here to get a cheap map, since you know, ha ha, me and dataplans never got along! Illegal hacking and all that." Oh god this is hilarious. It takes every ounce of self-control you have to keep your face perfectly flat as you add the caption 'check out the winner your sis found.'

Karkat speaks up, finding a break in Jade's nervous rambling. "Hey, have we met somewhere before?"

Terezi, in her infinite wisdom, chooses this very moment to poke her head around the corner shelf. "Look what I-"

She accomplishes in two seconds what has taken you your entire life to perfect: the utterly flat, Strider copyrighted, coolkid judgement stare. You're not even going to sue for infringement, you're so proud. God bless Terezi.

Jade and Karkat make expressions like they're about to be blindsided by a truck. Karkat looks at his arm in rapid panic. "Oh! Jade, look at the time. It's fucking scram o' clock! Don't we have to be in hide-our-asses, Canada by now?"

Jade puts her hands to her face like the _Home Alone_ kid. "Oh! You're soooooo right! How could we have lost track? We're so late, we're just going to have to go without a map!"

They laugh at each other, in the way you would imagine robots laughing at each other if they were trying to imitate human speech, then hook arms, flip swiftly around, and walk out the door.

Terezi slides up next to you as you watch them book it to Jade's motorcycle. They gesture wildly at each other, like stereotype caricatures of Italians on meth, and get on the bike.

"You have terrible taste." you say to Terezi, as you watch them drive away.

"You too."

Your phone buzzes in your hand. John sent a text back that says, 'who the fuck is that??? did she hook up with a drug addict now? she is in so much trouble!' You put it back in your pocket.

"Well." you say, staring out the window.

"Well."

You turn towards her, glancing across that silken straw dye job, her opaque glasses, and those stupid teeth. "What do you say to a good old fashioned rebound relationship? Just me, you, a lot of drinking, a lot of frustrated sex, and a lot of puke in your lap while I inevitably end up totally hammered?"

"Sounds delicious! But not as delicious as..." she holds up a two gallon tub of ice cream. "Double Butter Triple Cream Brownie Fudge Batter Chunky Monkey with Chocolate Pieces."

Your mouth drops open, butterflies fill your chest, and an unrelenting and absolutely terrifying feeling of utter admiration wells up in you. You say the only thing you can say.

"Terezi, I think this is the beginning of a long and beautiful rebound."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **DVD Extras!**  
>  I did a sketch of Terezi's outfit and then described it totally differently. [Here's an old outfit design.](http://oxfordroulette.tumblr.com/post/82548408770/draw-all-the-things-day-9-abandon-just-got)  
> [Tumblr announcement art](http://oxfordroulette.tumblr.com/post/88053875942/dave-strider-and-the-bat-out-of-hell-is-now)  
> [Short AU of this AU where _Dave_ is the god.](http://oxfordroulette.tumblr.com/post/116961886467/terezi-pyrope-and-the-strider-manpain-out-of-hell)
> 
> **FANWORK GALLERY:**   
>  [Fanart!: "theres too many damn daves all up in here"](https://artaline.tumblr.com/post/163289911183/sloppy-seconds-finished-the-underworld-by)
> 
> The next part in The Underworld Series, coming... sometime, is Rose Lalonde and Her Untimely Death! (Spoiler: Rose dies).


End file.
